RE: SPEC - Text

Jan Hardenbergh ([email protected])
Tue, 18 Apr 95 12:14:00 E


> I saved the best for last. Let's do text! Chris Marrin of SGI, bless his
> heart, came up with a great proposal for a simple text node based on
> Inventor's SoText3. I've included his message below. I generally like
his
> proposal, but I have two questions which I would like to put to the list:
>
> 1. Can we avoid I18N issues in the first version?
>
> How can we *not* avoid it?

I think we can do something that will work by sidestepping the character set
switching mechanism. Each "string" must be in a single character set. We
could reuse PEX terminology and refer to these as "mono-encdoded" strings.

A "character set" is a set of relations between "code points" (integer
indices) and
generic notions of glyphs. For example, 0x41 is an "A" in ASCII (& 8859/1 or
ISO
Latin-1). The character set has nothing to do with what type face
(appearance -
Helvetica, Old English, etc) the "A" is.

A "font" is a set of specific glyphs which can be indexed.

I think a minimalist approach would be to add a character set tag to the
SoText3,
and be able to identify Fonts and give them character sets, too. And, add
the
ability to have String16 character strings in SoText3.

This approach gets the gritty details out of the VRML spec. But, it puts the
responsibility into the browsers.

Can anyone summarize what is going on with I18n in the HTML world? I saw
a link to some info the other day, but did not follow it.

> 2. Should we accept the FontStyle node?

Yes.

YON, [email protected], Jan C. Hardenbergh, Oki Advanced Products 508-460-8655
http://www.oki.com/people/jch/ =|= 100 Nickerson Rd. Marlborough, MA 01776
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