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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: Implementing hyphenation / wordwrap for Thai
From:       Rudiger Koch <rkoch () sas ! co ! th>
Date:       1999-09-10 11:14:30
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On Fri, 10 Sep 1999, Jo Dillon wrote:
> 
>   Ok, I think I see. Hmmm, I don't know exactly how kword represents
> text internally, but I suspect it's possible to have some sort of marker
> within the structures holding the text.

After looking through the sources is seems to me that a paragraph object
separates the actual text and the layout. But I really don't understand how
it works so I'd appreciate some input from the KOffice gurus. Please keep
in mind that the approach should work for other Apps, KMail for instance.

>   I would suggest loadable shared libraries for each language -

Agreed! Now which methods is it supposed to export? I believe it should be
responsible for the user interface, too. That is the dialog box that pops up
after selecting Extra->Hyphenation or Extra->Word Separation. The languages
are far too different. There are for instance 2 different sets of rules for
hyphenation in German - the old and the new. Most other languages are fine
with just one ruleset.

> CORBA is probably a bit heavyweight. Hmmm - are there any other problems
> with Asian languages we can't handle? It would be useful to have
> general support for Chinese/Thai/Korean and so forth to match the Unicode
> support in Qt 2.0. Do we support text going top-to-bottom/right-to-left? :)

The QT docu says Thai is unsupported. Yet it works for me :) The QT docu also
says that Arabian is unsupported. Maybe it works, too? I believe QT supports
more than the Trolls think ;-) 

As for Thai, there is no problem we can't handle, just a host of minor
annoyances, like:

- the cursor appears about one position right of where it's
  supposed to be
- I couldn't get Thai fonts to show up in KWord and KIllustrator, probably
  because they don't use X fonts. Do they use Ghostscript fonts? I 
  played with GS; not very successful, though. The Thai X fonts are shown
  in the font selector. There seems to be an inconsistency!
  KPresenter works fine.
- I couldn't print any Thai from any X Application yet. Probably also a
  GS issue.
- Thai X fonts look terrible, are buggy and there are far too few of them.

Chinese characters represent a syllable or so. I guess all the word
separation, hyphenation and spellchecking issues don't apply. But there is a
whole bunch of other languages in and around India where it probably does.


-Rudiger

--
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 48 Villa 1 Yaowarat Soi 1             Fax: +66 76 214 041
 Phuket, Thailand 83000                rkoch@sas.co.th

 // Why use Windows when the door is open and free of charge?
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