Hello Don
On 10-Jul-01, you wrote:
>
> On 09-Jul-01, Matt Sealey wrote:
>
>> To work reliably, AmigaOS would need a font API capable of supporting,
>> and drawing, Unicode fonts. I tried to strike up a discussion on
>> support for this on AmigaOS or MorphOS on the ttf.library mailing list
>> but it devolved into a bunch of "I know better than you" from certain
>> members, and flamewars from some people who don't appreciate MorphOS.
>
> I thought the discussion started well, but there didn't seem to be any
> simple answer unless Olaf Barthel gets involved. AmigaOS itself needs
> Unicode support and it is hard to add this without upsetting existing
> programs.
Don, I'm telling you I've been through this, I researched it, I did a lot of
work looking at the AmigaOS and how it could possibly get support for
odd codepages, Unicode and the like.
You cannot (repeat CANNOT) do it using the existing API - since there is
no way of telling any of it what codepage you're using, or to tell Text()
which unicode format you're using: we could assume UTF8 but that would
mean that only the first 127 characters would be usable for old programs,
essentially breaking support for everything but English text: no umlauts,
no accents, no nothing.
Seriously, all you are going to get is a system whereby AmigaOS has the
old API, and there is a new API to use: and programs will either be
recompiled for the new, or continue using the old. After all, the chore
of unicode conversion isn't for everyone.
> It is something to think hard about for a few weeks.
I did. We don't need Olaf Barthel to tell us that it cannot be done. What
the OS needs is a unicode conversion library, and a library that can
load, manipulate, report and draw, unicode fonts, texts, and metrics
to supplement graphics.library and diskfont.library.
Text() cannot support this. TextFit() and TextExtent() also expect 8 bit
characters. diskfont.library apparently has no clue about what it's
doing - it only opens fonts in a very simple way. Bullet-like APIs have
to do all the work on AmigaOS, but as it stands there isn't a way of
accessing these reliably or efficiently to use Unicode texts.
>> Do you happen to know what the numeric value of these three entities
>> are?
>
> Pagestream has lower-case alpha, beta and gamma as 945, 946 and 947. I
> think these should be the Unicode numbers as PGS supports Unicode.
Okay, thanks.
--
Matt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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