[Vm-dev] Re: Pasting unicode (was Re: Pharo:: Re: Cuis update)

[Andreas Raab]

Juan Vuletich wrote:
> BTW, the image needs to deal with different VMs using various encoding 
> for clipboard data. Currently, a check is made, to assume UTF-8 if on 
> Windows, and MacRoman elsewhere. It seems Mac will support UTF-8 soon.
> 
> I think we need a new primitive, perhaps #clipboardEncoding, or 
> #vmTextEncoding, that could answer UTF-8 / MacRoman / ASCII and may be 
> others. That would ease supporting various VMs with the same image.
> 
> WRT keyboard events, it seems not to be necessary. VMs store Unicode 
> keystrokes in different slots in the event buffer, than the one used for 
> MacRoman. So, the image can tell, right?
> 
> What do you think?

Although you are technically correct, I think the days of Latin1 only 
support are simply over and I would prefer to move forward and leave 
them completely behind us. The best way to achieve this is when all VMs 
use UTF-8 everywhere and all VMs produce Unicode input characters. The 
changes to support this aren't difficult (just a bit tedious) and the 
image side is trivial for those images that don't need (or want) to 
support Unicode. I really don't see any value in fiddling with different 
encodings since UTF-8 is both canonical and well supported.

Cheers,
   - Andreas