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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Why was this feature removed?
From:       James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj () acm ! org>
Date:       2002-11-27 12:54:24
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Lars Knoll wrote:
 >> On Monday November 25, 2002 07:48, Chris Carlen wrote:
 >>
 >>> In KDE 2.2.x there was a selection box/dropdown that would let
 >>> one set the encoding to be used for a font, so we would set that
 >>> to tis620-0, the Thai standard encoding, otherwise known as
 >>> iso8859-11.
 >>
 >> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39185
 >>
 >> Please submit supporting information to this bug report, which asks
 >> asks for this very problem to be fixed.
 >
 >
 > The report has some valid points, but the wrong solutions in mind.
 > Character encodings as tis-620 or 8859-1 should die in the user
 > interface where not needed (ie for everything else than reading and
 > writing data streams). What we're really talking about is scripts.
 > Eg. specifying a default font for the Japanese script or the Thai
 > script. The user should not have to care about the fact that the font
 > is encoded in tis-620 or iso10646-1.

You make a valid point.  But it is also true that we are NOT there yet.
  And, until we are, we should keep manual override as an option.

And, yes it is better to use names for the scripts like Mozilla does. 
There is no reason that the user needs to worry about the encodings 
unless they need to use something which is non-standard (not ISO).
 >
 > Most non geek users have no idea about these things anyway. You can
 > see this looking the reports wondering why a filename shows up as
 > question marks when they typed in a thai name.

The problem here is that the actual file name was all '?'s, not that it
was just displayed that way.

 > It's the problem that the file system uses locale encoding. But this
 > is a different problem and has to be solved on a filesystem and file
 > encoding level where the move should finally go to using utf8 for all
 > of this.

It appears that I am going to have to RTFM about UniCode and UTF8 so I 
will know exactly what is going on.  But, I can NOT see how it is 
possible to have more than one encoding with only 8 bits unless there is 
some markup.
 >
 > Back to the font problem: People _do_ however know about the
 > difference between Thai and Latin as scripts, and would like to be
 > able to select a set of default/fallback fonts for a certain script.
 >
 > This is a problem of Qt and it's known to us. We are currently trying
 > to find a fix for these issues. Unfortunately X11s broken font system
 > makes it not exactly easy to do so, especially on old commercial
 > Xservers.

I can't see that X11's font system is broken.  I thought that the XLFD 
was a good idea, that applications should use it rather than reinventing 
the wheel.  But perhaps you do not refer to the current version of XFree86.

--
JRT

 
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