Gavin ([email protected]), you say: "This proposal is absolutely unusable." but
you give no reason? I'll assume this was a typo and you meant to say
"This proposal is absolutely usable." :-)
I'll done alot of work in I18N. The complexity of the issue is revealed
in the number of implementations available. In adding I18N to Inventor,
I'm leaning toward mbChars - an X window concept which uses single byte
characters with escapes to change encoding and to represent character sets
with more than 256 glyphs. Then a Font node simply has to describe a
family - the encoding from the character string takes care of the rest.
But I'm not recommending the above, or any other proposal for I18N. HTML
is surviving today with ISO8859-1 as the only supported encoding. I think
we should start from there.
I have one addition I'd like to make to my original proposal. I'd like to
add "MFFloat width" to the Text node. This is an array or string widths,
one for each string in the "text" field. It allows each string to be set
at a desired width to fit in a given space. It overcomes the differences
in the natural set widths of the fonts used in the various
implementations. The default is 0, which indicates the natural set width
should be used for all strings. Similarly, a value of 0 at any index of
the width field indicates that the corresponding string should be set at
its natural width.
I'd really like to see the spacing and justification fields left in.
They're simple to implement and extremely useful. I'd also like the
parts field left so when we get around to defining profiles we won't need
to define a new text node and we won't break backward compatibility.
--
chris marrin ,,.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. ,`` 1$`
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"As a general rule, don't solve puzzles that open portals to Hell."
- excerpt from "A Horror Movie Character's Survival Guide"