I found the the new version of Abiword today and was finally able to download the Win32 binaries. I find that Abiword has a problem communicating with the Windows international keyboard support facility (internat.exe), and there are a number of other issues about non-Ascii character support. First, I can't use multiple keyboard layouts within Abiword. When I start Abiword, the keyboard always switches back to my default keyboard (German). Τhis is in principle legitimate for a Windows application, though disappointing. But there is more: If during an Abiword session I try to switch keyboard layout, the system tray icon does report a successful change (changing its display from "De" to, say, "Gr"). Αbiword then does recognize changes in the layout of Ascii non-letter characters, but it keeps using standard Ascii characters for the letter keys. There is no way of getting characters outside the default system codepage typed in. If an application really cannot support multiple keyboard layouts (fair enough), then the requirement for a well-behaved Windows app as far as I understand is that it should at least tell internat.exe so, and explicitly reject the messages that internat.exe sends out to it when a user requests a keyboard change. I saw a bug report about problems with Chinese IME support in bugzilla, and a number of queries about international characters on this list recently. Maybe the issues are related? The second issue is about internal representation of non-Ascii characters. The font selection dialog of Abiword has a dropdown box for "script" (i.e. codepage), just as in the standard Windows font "common dialog". The expected behavior would be that if I enter, say, the German letter o-umlaut (hexF6 in cp1252), then select it and change "script=Greek" in the font dialog, the character should be displayed as a Greek letter phi (hexF6 in cp1253). This doesn't happen. I can think of two possible reasons: Either the internal representation of both letters in Abiword is Unicode, in which case no transformation could (or should) change the one character into the other anyway. In that case the whole concept of "script" or "codepage" in a font dialog seems out of place and the dropdown box should not be there at all. (A choice of "encoding" might be a useful feature in a save-file and open-file dialog, though.) Or, the function of that dropdown box is not yet implemented. Abiword also does not support the alternative Windows feature whereby multiple-codepage fonts are provided by the Windows GDI to "dumb" applications that do not themselves know about multiple codepages. If I have a unicode font, say Times New Roman, and specify the following lines in my Win.ini file: [FontSubstitutes] Times New Roman Greek,161=Times New Roman,161 then even the dumbest application ought to be able to use a Greek (codepage cp1253) version of that font. In that case, the font dialog ought to list "Times New Roman" and "Times New Roman Greek" as two separate fonts, instead of giving an option to chose a "script" within one font. If I copy Greek characters from other applications or from the Windows clipboard into Abiword in this way, they are always interpreted as cp1252 (thus, a Greek phi is transformed into a German o-umlaut.) Since Abiword reportedly is a Unicode-aware application, I was a bit disappointed to see that (outside the support of multiple 8-bit codepages, which will hopefully be functional some day) there seems to be no Abiword-internal alternative way of entering those Unicode characters that happen not to be in any of the Windows codepages. MS Word has such a feature in its "insert special characters" dialog. The Abiword "insert special characters" feature apparently offers access only to those truetype fonts that are marked as symbol fonts, and that means only to the first 256 characters of each. I must say I'm a bit disappointed. Unfortunately I'm not enough of a programmer to help a lot, so I see myself sticking with Microsoft Word again... Maybe this should have gone to the abiword-developer list or to bugzilla instead of this list. Can somebody of the people who monitor this list please take care it's reported in the appropriate place? Thanks, Lukas ----------------------------------------------------- Lukas Pietsch University of Freiburg English Department Phone (p.) (#49) (761) 696 37 23 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
