macroman versus unicode versus m17n support

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Dec 22 17:25:31 UTC 2003


"Andreas Raab" <andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi Lex,
> 
> > Also, Andreas seems (tentatively) happy with the XWindows encoding.  And
> > since obviously the Unix port can easily support XWindows encoding, that
> > would mean XWindows is convenient at least for the big three platforms.
> 
> Tentatively, yes. But when I spent some time to make this happen it turned
> out to be significantly more effort than I thought it would. Some of the
> mappings are not unique and some of the keyboards don't really provide what
> (I think) they should. Having been into this issue various times now it
> seems that while it may be nice to provide a homogenous view for the Squeak
> side it seems easier to achieve this by merely passing up the "raw" codes
> and process them inside the image using a table that maps from the raw codes
> to whatever we decide to use inside the image.
> 

I don't understand the issue.  What do you mean by the two items about
being unique and about keyboards providing what one would think they
should?

As a discussion point, have you considered how to rewrite
ParagraphEditor under the "raw codes" approach?  Would it work out okay?
 If PE has to use raw platform-specific codes in key events, then it
would seem to need separate handling for each encoding of raw events
that it might see.  It would also need a way to find out what encoding
is being used -- should it simply consult the platform string name?

The situation looks funny from a distance, because the XWindows encoding
has served Linux/x86 well, and Linux/x86 uses the same keyboard that MS
Windows does.  Of course, XWindows may be getting lower-level events
than are available via MS Windows.


By the way, is there a listing of the Windows key encodings anywhere?  I
would love to take a gander at it some time.


Lex



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