Some snips about this topic..
> >> To work reliably, AmigaOS would need a font API capable of supporting,
> >> and drawing, Unicode fonts.
AmigaOS itself needs
> > Unicode support and it is hard to add this without upsetting existing
> > programs.
> 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.
It would be simple enough to write an Amiga library which could load a
set of (many!) fonts, and turn UTF16 or text with embedded α sort of
things,
and then print the characters calling Text. But
- it would be very slow
- it would use a very large amount of memory
- it couldn't add diacritical marks, or do character shaping &c
In short, it would be too inflexible.
The only really practical way for present Amiga programs to use Unicode,
would
be for a unicode program to make representations of unicode strings into the
form
of pictures on the clipboard. Too slow - inefficient use of memory - too
inflexible.
But, for an HTML viewer to support unicode and CSS2, it would have to be
written from scratch. I don't see how these capabilties can be plugged in to
the existing Amiga browsers. HTML - CSS2 - Unicode must all be written as
an integrated total in my opinion - they can't easily be just plugged into
each other.
_____________________________________________________________________
Voyager Mailing List - http://v3.vapor.com/
Voyager FAQ....: http://faq.vapor.com/voyager/
Listserver Help: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=HELP
Unsubscribe....: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=UNSUBSCRIBE
