2009/6/29 Philippe Marschall <philippe.marschall at gmail.com>:
> 2009/6/29 Igor Stasenko <siguctua at gmail.com>:
>> 2009/6/29 Philippe Marschall <philippe.marschall at gmail.com>:
>>> 2009/6/28 Klaus D. Witzel <klaus.witzel at 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
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.