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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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