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Re: internationalization
Massimo Campostrini <campo@mailbox.difi.unipi.it> writes:
> An ultimate solution would be adopting Unicode (ISO-10646). The
> internal representation could be UTF-8, which is compatible with
> ASCII. Unicode support is getting widespread; we can hope that
> Unicode software and fonts will be available on most systems Real Soon
> Now.
I'm getting convinced that UTF-8 + ISO-10646 is the way to go. It's
backwards compatible with ASCII, reasonably simple, covers every
imaginable language. I'm lurking in a couple of mailing lists (gtk,
mozilla.i18n) and it's the way both projects are going.
Stan, what do you think? Can we decide that UTF-8 + ISO-10646 is
*the* xconq character set, and implement display when need arise? I
mean character set for strings only! Identifiers etc. should remain
plain ASCII.
gtk code should help x11/xconq, either we (me?) port xconq to gtk or
we snarf code from it (it's LGPL'd). This would leave us (Ronne?)
with the task of implementing it on mac/xconq.
BTW, there is no need to implement *all* of ISO-10646 at once! We
might aim at first for MES (Minimum European Subset), which is enough
for about every European language and it's not too big (926
characters). See http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/mes.html. I
heard of iso10646-mes fonts for X, which should help us a lot.
It would be nice to have a mechanism to "translate" characters
unavailable for some reason (unimplemented, font missing...), but this
looks like a lot of "grunt" work.
Regards,
Massimo