Patches: Xft and i18n enhancements

Mike FABIAN mfabian at suse.de
Thu Apr 3 11:37:38 EST 2003


Ben Jansens <ben at orodu.net> さんは書きました:

> When I started hacking on Openbox 2, I really didn't have the slightest clue
> what was going on with locales vs UTF-8 etc, so when I started adding UTF-8
> support, I went about things all wrong. Not to mention the use of catgets.
>
> I appreciate the informative email. I have since learnt the err of how xft
> fonts were handled in the Openbox 2 styles, how they're opened, and about
> such font aliases. Openbox 3 is going to be much better for this.
>  a) I am using gettext instead of catgets

Good idea, I believe gettext is more convenient than catgets too.

>  b) All translations will be read in UTF-8:
>     bind_textdomain_codeset(PACKAGE_NAME, "UTF-8");
>  c) Not using Xlib font routines at all. Only using the Xft2 font routines,
>     so UTF-8 can always be drawn.

I think that is a good idea as well. I only tried to fix the support
for the Xlib font routines because I thought a patch might be rejected
immediately if I suggested to remove them.  But while trying to fix
them I realized again how much easier Xft2 is.

I removed the support for single fonts via Xlib already and kept
only fontsets to simplify it at least a little bit. But it is still
ugly compared to Xft2.

Xft2 is certainly the way to go and investing much time to fix the
Xlib font supports only for compatibility with old systems is probably
not worth it.

Gnome2 already requires Xft2 and I heard GTK2 will require Xft2 soon
as well. I.e. nobody seems to think it makes sense to support older
systems with Gnome2.

If supporting old systems gets in the way with improving openbox
for modern systems, I think it's OK to drop support for old systems.

>  d) All strings will be treated as UTF-8, so menus etc will all need to be in
>  	UTF-8 format.
>  e) The few strings I get from window hints for display, which are not in
>     UTF-8 are immediately converted to UTF-8 using the glib conversion
> 	routines.
>  f) Fonts are specified in the rc file using simply a string, so the font
>     you choose can be as fancy or as simple as you want. The fallback font
> 	will be "sans" or a variation of "sans" so multiple languages should
> 	perform better here too.
>  g) I think that's it. I'd appreciate if someone with some
>     multibyte/non-english fonts and skills could try out openbox3 from CVS
> 	in the near future. (Its having some build issues at the moment, as I'm
> 	removing the use of automake, but in the next few days everything should
> 	be rocking again.)

That sounds very good!

I'd like to test openbox3 from CVS.

I just made a CVS checkout to have a look, but currently many files
seem to be missing. The 'src' directory is empty for example
and there are not many source files in other places either.

Is that only because of the restructuring of the build system you
mentioned?

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian at suse.de>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。



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