Hello Matt,
> > (Ken) 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
>
> (Matt) I said all this. I've researched it.. I got bored of people
constantly saying
> "it would be simple" when it isn't. It's not simple: there is no way of
ever
> making AmigaOS apps as they currently stand support Unicode fonts and
> Unicode text through the current API calls.
We don't really disagree. In fact it is simple to do what I said (which is
simply
to convert unicodes into calls to Text using *many* fonts - all memory
resident -
and in fact I did it and it worked. But it isn't - as your post said -
really unicode,
since it only shows glyphs one after the other & doesn't put diacritical
marks in the
right place, &c &c.
For the last 18 months I have been working on writing a true Unicode
application
for the Amiga. This consists of the following:
- zillions of glyphs, in a range of sizes (*hard* work)
- a library, which can either do things glyph by glyph as above, or
else
(much more complex and very intricate) add diacritical marks to
glyphs, proper
bidirectionality, format everything into lines, mix characters of all
different
sizes, &c. This is all done in a somewhat object oriented way. The
output
can be saved as a self formattable self contained file which a small
library can call to
print it onto a window or rastport. Or the output can be saved as an
IFF image.
- a comprehensive UcodeSlave program which can accept ARexx commands to
do all the above.
- the ability to make any arbitrary combination of unicode glyphs into
an Amiga
bitmapped font.
- the ability to grab glyphs from bitmapped fonts into unicode glyhps.
- the ability to accept input in various formats (HTML text, UTF8,
UTF16, shift-jis &c &c)
- lots of sample programs & scripts, extensive docs, and a viewer &
editor of
glyphs
All this will be freeware and open source. If anyone wants, I will send them
a copy
of my work so far, most of which is nearly ready for beta testing. But only
some of the
glyphs, as it would be too big to email the lot.
It's all getting close to finished now. But to use it, existing applications
would need to
have new code written in the form of library calls or suitable ARexx
commands.
You may or may not be right in saying that it wouldn't take much to make
existing
Amiga programs show Unicode. (Actually I'm not sure if you're saying it
would
be easy, or would be impossible).
But CSS2 is another matter. I was talking about
HTML4 + CSS2 + Unicode all three, and I stand by my claim that a HTML4
viewer would have to be written with CSS2 (or any other style system) in
mind,
that style sheets can't just be plugged in. They can be plugged in to the
HTML4
*writer* - of course! That's what style sheets are for - but *not* the HTML
*reader*. I
know enough about programming to know HTML4+CSS2 reader would be
*very* messy to program. Especially with the tight memory constraints that
Amigas present.
> There is less to be done to support unicode than you might think - the
only
> things requiring conversion are html entities (they'd need real codepoints
> rather than latin1 ones), html attribute values (<img name="string"> -
> everything between the quotes) and text that isn't a tag. V already does
> this - it needs to scan these strings for entities anyway, getting the
name
> of the codepage from the HTTP header or a META tag is simple as hell. What
> would be the difficulty in adding a Unicode conversion step from some
> web codepage to some standard one, UTF8 or UTF16 let's say, usable by
> a new font API?
>
> About 10 lines of code in various places? Less than that, even..
>
10!! - are you serious? more like >10,000. Unicode doesn't come in images,
it comes as text, and it is very complex and intricate changing it into
images,
especially when bearing in mind the needs of CSS2. Take it from one who
knows.
> It's not hard to get your app to talk in Unicode, they designed it that
way,
> and good design of a new Unicode API would make it even easier.
Talking it is one thing. Displaying it is another.
Well - there it is. I was first attracted to the Amiga partly because of the
real
international flavour of the Amiga community. I hope we'll be able to get
Unicode up and running so we can continue that flavour.
When the next Amiga OS comes out, I expepct that Voyager will need a major
re-write anyway. So, hopefully, we will see it provide Unicode
functionality.
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