Re: Traditional Chinese partially supported

[Pete French]

I am very interested in this work, because I have been working on
multi-linugal support at work as well. Not for Chinese specifically,
but to fit full Unicode support into my own Objectve C strings that
I use on thw website (this was started in the days when GNUstep would compile
under Cygwin so unfortunately I couldnt use it - which is exasperating
nopw as I ahve to maintain my own foundation libraries, but anyway)

>   http://www.people.virginia.edu/~yc2w/GNUstep/Chinese/NSMenu.gif
>   http://www.people.virginia.edu/~yc2w/GNUstep/Chinese/Ink.gif

That is excellent! Especially the latter - we have a requirement to
mix japanese and english in the same string. I want to do this in GNUstep
too.

>   Because I use XftDrawStringUtf8 in XftFontInfo,
>   all the strings have to be converted into UTF8 encoding before drawing.
>   That is very easy for most 1 bytes character, but not 2 bytes.
>   In XGGState.m, once DPSshow receive an UCS-2-INTERNAL string,
>   it is converted into a UTF8 string via NSString's method.

Interesting. So do these changes just affect Big5 encoding, or will they
make all strings draw using XftDrawStringUtf8 ? I havent tried mixing
characters under GNUstep yet and drawing them, but surely this would be
a good way to draw all characters ? Elsse how do you decide when you need
to use this function aspposed to the 8 bit function ?

I havent looked at the innards of an NSString myself - I had always assumed
that it was internally stored as either UTF-8 (or possibly UTF-16) so
it could just be drawn and output directly.

>   Another suggestion is that GNUstep can use DrawStringUtf8 function instead
> of DrawString8.

That sounds like a very good idea to me at first reading...

-bat.