On 07-08-2013, at 5:28 AM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
> [snip]
> Yes, although we do not usually have fonts installed that provide more than Latin-1. The mechanism is there but largely unused (there is only a handful of WideString instances in our image). Installing wide fonts isn't exactly trivial either, IIRC for TTFs all glyphs outside Latin-1 get stripped unless you know which line in which method to change.
> 
I know there's been work done on using pango/cairo/something to improve on this and of course Scratch on Windows/OSX uses a bit of Pango in the UnicodePlugin. The Scratch code explicitly excludes unix at the moment and anyway there is no UnicodePlugin for Pi, so in a way it's all moot for now. Arabic locale in Scratch on a Pi looks like the CIA has been at the document…



>> Currently Scratch expects the translation dictionary files it uses to have utf8 encoded strings for the not-english translations, so a utf8 class of some sort will be required in order to stuff them and translate to WideString.
> 
> This is one of the system/squeak boundaries. The PO files are utf8 encoded, you should change that reader to return proper WideStrings (just by a strategically placed utf8ToSqueak send).

Ah, yes. I had seen that pair of methods en passant and wondered about them. Useful.

> 
>> I don't suppose the code currently in Squeak handles right-to-left languages? 
> 
> 
> It does not, which is why I suggested to keep using Scratch's text rendering.
As above,  for right now there effectively isn't any . Some interesting work to do to fix that. ;-)


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- Thinks E=MC^2 is a rap star.