Re: [hatari-devel] GEMDOS filename handling

[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
- Text layout engine like Pango, ICU or HarfBuzz to handle
  things related to different languages such as right-to-left
  text, characters that are drawn from multiple overlapped glyphs,
  vertical text and so on
- Interfaces to out-of-process text input methods for all
  the relevant OSes (each one has different mechanism,
  and such methods are mandatory e.g. for Chinese)
- GUI that scales automatically to text sizes and isn't
  constrained by Hatari window size (minimum extra space
  you need to reserve for translations is 1/3 of English
  strings)

For that the only real options are either one of the major widget
toolkits (Gtk, Qt or native Windows/OSX one), or HTML engines.
Even them are still crappy at properly dealing with internalization.

We already have OSX GUI and Linux PyGtk GUI.  At least latter
supports UTF-8 strings fine.  Internationalization & real file
selector were some of the reasons why I wrote it.


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. :-)


	- Eero