2014-07-22 23:02 GMT+02:00 tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org:
Has anyone done any work on neatly integrating UTF8 strings, editing, our scanners, displaying with Cairo/pango etc?
I have the Cairo/pango based Unicode plugin working on the pi but I'd like to use it neatly rather than ad hoc hacky. Nic Cellier & I did a lot of clean up last year for the scanners implementations of scanning but not so much for the displaying. It seems like something that ought to be done at some point. I'm actually a bit miffed to discover that Cairo/pango requires UTF8 strings, which have to about the most complicated possible strings for editing. We have our Mac-roman encoded byte strings and full Unicode 32bit wide strings and can indeed convert to/from UTF8 but I'm not too keen on constantly going back and forth.
MacRoman? Beware Tim, you have slept too long, but I must tell you the awfull truth now. ByteString are not anymore MacRoman encoded. They are ISO8859L1 (latin 1) which matches Unicode on first 256 code points...
Converting to UTF8 seems hackish, but should just work. Why would you have to go back from UTF8? Optimization? (storing the UTF8 result)
Or could we create a UTF8String class?
Is there anything out there I can use?
/tim {insert witticism here}