Re: [hatari-devel] GEMDOS filename handling

[Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxx>]

Am Thu, 14 Aug 2014 22:19:16 +0300
schrieb Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Hi,
> 
> On torstai 14 elokuu 2014, Thomas Huth wrote:
> > schrieb Eero Tamminen <oak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> > > It's probably easiest to make sure the that SDL GUI font has
> > > same character table as Atari so that the same mapping can
> > > be used as what you used for GEMDOS HD emulation.
> > 
> > Please don't do that! We might want to add i18n support to the GUI
> > one day and then we certainly do not want to mess around with
> > strings in the Atari codepage there. IMHO UTF-8 is the way to go
> > for the GUI.
> 
> I've been involved with internationalization at GUI widget level.
> There's no point in trying to do something like that properly
> with SDL.
> 
> You would need:
> - to use common vector (truetype, opentype etc) fonts as you're going
>   to need tens of thousands glyps they offer, and FreeType library
>   to render them
> - Fontconfig library to match glyphs from multiple fonts in case
>   one font doesn't have all glyphs needed to draw a string
[...]

I don't think we need the full monty in the GUI - e.g. there are hardly
any users of Hatari in Asian countries, so limiting our glyphs to those
of the "western" countries should be enough for Hatari.

> What I suggested, is something that should be doable to the SDL
> GUI with relatively modest effort and which would then match
> what the GEMDOS HD emulation now supports. :-)

Using an ancient character set in the GUI will prevent future
enhancements. For example on OS X, the alert dialogs are already
wrapped to native OS X dialogs. When we finally add i18n to Hatari one
day, these dialogs will look very ugly when being used with Atari
character set strings.

 Thomas