2009/6/29 Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall@gmail.com:
2009/6/29 Igor Stasenko siguctua@gmail.com:
2009/6/29 Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall@gmail.com:
2009/6/28 Klaus D. Witzel klaus.witzel@cobss.com:
... goals: render _every_ glyph that is in _any_ modern (Unicode) platform font; make fonts offline and online usable, especially on small devices if needed, on demand (by end user).
So you have to select the font and you don't select it using #leadingChar?
Btw, can someone explain me, what is a #leadingChar in Character, and how it affects the output/input & different encodings/text representation?
At some point when rendering text you need to know the language of it. You could put this information in a lot of different places like paragraph, document, whatever. However since an interned integer on Squeak currently has 30bits available and Unicode is a 22bit character set why not take that 8 spare bits put that information into each character? Yeah, there some minor limitations like there are way more than 255 languages in the world and for any latin-1 character you wouldn't be able to set the language and if you wanted to use unicode you're supposed to set the language of non-Latin1 characters to something different than the one of the Latin-1 characters. It could kinda work if there was only one image, sort of. These days you'd probably use FreeType to get nice text rendering which doesn't need or use the information at the character level but anyway.
Now it starts to get funny when you're interacting with the outside world. They are not likely to use Squeak so they don't pass language information at the character level to you. So what language do you use for incoming characters? Well isn't really defined because it never really was designed to handle that.
Seaside kinda tends to communicate with the outside world, you see the problem? And our code ideally should also run on GemStone, VAST, VW, ....
Oh, and the language is of course taken into account for #=. That's funny because the strings you get could come from anywhere: database, ui, file, .... where you have no control whatsoever over what language is used. It could also have been done on a different computer with a different language setting.
So, do i understood you right: this information (leadingChar) could be useful sometimes. But real world examples showing that its completely useless , at least by now. And often only adds an unnecessary complexity & confusion in handing a text & communicating with world outside the Squeak.
Cheers Philippe