Re: multilanguage environment

[Björn Gohla]

On Monday 22 April 2002 05:14, Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
>   From my little experience,
>   if you get * for every non-latin character,
>   you have to set the correct encoding in your environment variable
> GNUSTEP_STRING_ENCODING.
>   And the GNUstep-base should handle it correctly.

i am kind of wondering why i should have to set GNUSTEP_STRING_ENCODING 
anyway, as the problematic strings are read from a gnustep escape coded 
property list, which gnustep should be able to read regardless. as gnustep 
always knows the internal encoding of strings (i assume) and NSString s are 
transparently convertable to unicode (i assume again), it should have no 
trouble finding a font to show the string, even if that meant using the rough 
looking misc-fixed-* unicode fonts.

>   If you get nothing or garbage in GNUstep-gui/GNUstep-back,
>   you have to check whether the font encoding in Xwindow and GNUstep is
> correct.
>   In my case, I use XFree86 4.1.0 and module xtt (freetype didn't work for
> unknown reasons),
>   my font is -big5-0, but it is actually iso10464-1 internally.
>   Therefore I have to edit my fonts.dir, fonts.alias, etc
>   so that GNUstep can get it right.
>   I don't quite understand how Xwindow handle the encoding of font,
>   therefore, only a few of my Chinese fonts work in GNUstep.
>   GNUstep use font cache and I don't know how GNUstep cache the fonts.
>   Therefore, I set GSFontMask = *-iso* in .GNUstepDefualts so that it won't
> use the -big5-0 font.
>   It is quite complicated how Xwindow handle the font encoding.
>   For example, a Chinese font can be -big5-0, -iso10464-1, or -gb1xxx
> encoding,
>   and Xwindow can handle it via encodings.dir or other machenism depending
> on xtt or freetype modules.
>   I don't know how GNUstep cache the font when it meet the same font name
> but different encodings.
>   Therefore, I force it to cache iso* font so that only iso10464-1 encoding
> will be used.
>   Set the NSBoldFont, NSFont, NSUserFont, NSLabelFont, NSMenuFont, etc to
> the right font name.