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RE: Reinventing the wheel (Re: Hebrew Editor)



At 06:17 -0800 on 13/03/2000, Ilya Khayutin wrote:


>I was talking about full hebrew support, built-in into
>gtk+. Not only a bidi widget but also give the ability
>to create a hebrew UI and so on... This is what we
>really need for Linux hebrew support.

If I may add my 2c to the discussion.

If any of you is serious about creating international support to the 
level allowing normal word processors, basic or advanced, should have 
some estimate of how big this task is and how much it involves. It is 
*definitely* more than just the tweaking of a text widget.

Just to get this estimate, I strongly suggest that you take a look at 
Apple's documentation of the internationalization services within the 
MacOS.

   http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macos8/TextIntlSvcs/textintlsvcs.html

Before you jump: yes, I know the MacOS is a primitive operating 
system, doesn't have preemptive multitasking, protected memory, or 
indeed a decent memory management scheme. But its GUI has been 
internationalized for ages, before Windows were even invented, much 
less internationalized. I used to write WYSIWYG Hebrew-English 
documents on a Mac back in 1986 myself... A look at their API is 
certainly a good clue to what internationalization entails.

Just to point you around - what Apple calls "TextEdit" is their 
parallel to a simple text widget like the one we were talking about. 
As you can see in that site, it's just one little part of the whole 
scheme...

Think font rendering, kerning, styling, input methods for languages 
whose character sets don't necessarily fit on a keyboard, 
bidirectionality within styled spans (superscripts and subscripts), 
character connection in Arabic, nikud, and so on.

Once somebody actually does the job of making a set of libraries for 
international support (and I gather it won't be a single person), 
there can be many applications coming out of it to benefit us all: a 
normal web browser, for one, low and high level word processors, 
presentation software, visual application builders, PDF readers, and 
whatnot.

Herouth


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