At 18:37 -0600 2001-11-13, David Starner wrote: > ><cut> > >On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 10:00:02AM +1100, George W Gerrity wrote: >> For those of you not familiar with Mac OS, a keyboard layout and >> input method are coupled to a language (group) AND a font system. > >Seems limiting. A QWERTY keyboard does Swahilli just fine, and a >keyboard with the appropriate keys could easily handle a number of >languages at once.
Sorry to mislead you. On the Mac OS, a keyboard is a driver for a particular device AND a mapping. I suppose they have drivers for non-QWERTY type devices, but I have never looked. Thus, if I specify a Russian keyboard on my Bronze G3 PowerBook built-in keyboard, I get a mapping to that keyboard for the standard way a Russian keyboard has Cyrillic mapped to it. I also have a Cyrillic-QWERTY keyboard (which I use -- I'm not a native-born Russian) that maps equivalent keys, eg, Cyrillic B (don't have unicode on this machine yet -- next week!) to QWERTY B. More complex systems, such as Chinese, have a number of input methods associated with the hardware keyboard(s) associated with your machine. > > My interest (and my interest in monitoring this e-mail group) lies in >> the possibility of getting involved in an open WYSIWYG document >> editor based on XML and UTF-8, so I (and others) can get out of the >> thrall of Word. To be successful, such an application will HAVE to be >> a) WYSIWYG; b) multi platform; c) able to read and dump rtf format, >> even if the result is crippled; d) be modular and open (source and >> APIs), both to spread the development effort and to encourage its use. > >Have you considered looking at existing systems? Yes. There is at least one commercial system written in Java, whose betas I have been monitoring since I decided that I wanted to do something like this. But, unless there is a choice, and one of them is REALLY cheap or free, and it is really portable, and it is well=designed, and it has adequate support, and it can migrate documents to and from Word, it will never be seen as an alternative. Moreover, until there is such an editor on *UNIX* machines, they will never get on to ordinary people's desks. >What about KWord? Don't know it. Give me a web reference to itws characteristics: I'm not into re-inventing the wheel, but finding out just what KDB and other windowing stuff actually DOES is hard without downloading, compiling, and trying it out. As I said in my previous missive, that has to wait for a month or so.. >Why does it have to XML-based? > Two reasons: first, any document produced will then be completely portable and readable by ANY XML-competent device, including an approximation to the layout and style that you set up for the document, since there will be accompanying CSS or XSLT data. Thus, persons not liking my editor can use another. Second, the document will be in a recognised standard form for archiving and referencing purposes. Second, XML strongly supports UTF-8, and that is the key to multi-lingual documents, which are going to be the only way to go very soon now. George -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
