[openbox] Menu and UTF-8

[Arwed von Merkatz]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 11:27:30AM -0400, Ben Jansens wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 03:07:15PM +0200, Tomas Hellstr|m wrote:
> > Is it possible to have UTF-8 encoded entries in the menu?
> > I've noticed the <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> -thingy in the
> > beginning of menu.xml, but all I get when reloading the menu is those
> > little "I can't understand this character"-squares instead of my
> > japanese characters. Maybe it's a font problem since window-titles which
> > is encoded in this way doesn't work either. I have UTF-8 support in
> > most other programs (mozilla, gaim etc) and it would be nice to have it in
> > openbox too.
> 
> All text is rendering using XFT's UTF-8 routines. Afaik, it should work
> fine. Your font has to support the characters though. Otherwise, I don't
> know what the issue is.
> 
> Ben

The difference is that Openbox uses Xft but not fontconfig. fontconfig
includes a fallback mechanism when dealing with unsupported characters,
so if the font you're using doesn't have some characters you want to
display it automatically switches to a different font for those
characters. That way in gtk2 and mozilla, if i open a japanese page the
font rendering uses bitstream vera sans for all supported characters and
falls back to arial unicode for kanji.
Not sure how hard it would be to add the needed fontconfig stuff to
openbox, though it would be really nice.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz
Grimoire Guru for video
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