Re: multilanguage environment

[Alexander Malmberg]

> i am having big trouble working with non latin scripts in gnustep, is there
> nobody out there working with languages that use non-latin scripts?

I don't really work much with non-latin scripts, but I do a lot of
testing with them, and it does work.

> does
> gnustep not use unicode to encode strings internally?

It does. (Sortof; strings might be stored differently for efficiency,
but externally everything will behave like unicode strings.)

> i do have iso-10646-1
> fonts installed on my system, why can gnustep not use them?

In what way does it not work? Do you get '*' instead of non-latin
characters, or garbage, or nothing at all?

Problems are probably because of the xgps backend. You might want to add
debug logging to setupAttributes in XGFont.m:232 and XftFontInfo.m:310
to check the value of mostCompatibleEncoding and work from there (X
might not be providing the correct attributes, or xgps might be using
eg. *-foo-bar-iso8859-1 instead *-foo-bar-iso10646-1). Using the Xft
anti-aliased fonts stuff might help.

Plug :) : my freetype/libart-based backend handles unicode properly, so
if your iso-10646-1 fonts are truetype fonts that would be an option
(type1 might work too, though I haven't tested that; possible freetype
needs to be told that it needs to load the .pfm/.afm files as well).

- Alexander Malmberg