[vdr] Re: VDR Plugin System - First Step

[Klaus Schmidinger <Klaus.Schmidinger@cadsoft.de>]

Sergei Haller wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 10 May 2002, Alessio Sangalli (AS) wrote:
> 
> AS> Sergei Haller wrote:
> AS>
> AS>
> AS> > there are several languages using non-latin letters
> AS> >  - tere are some for which font files could be easily created
> AS> >    (like cyrillic and greek)
> AS> >  - and some which are much more complicated
> AS> >    (like chinese or arabic)
> AS> >
> AS> > if someone is going to reimlement (a part of) the font selection in vdr,
> AS> > maybe at least the first block of languages could be covered.
> AS>
> AS> generating the fonts it's pretty easy,
> 
> yes.
> 
> AS> the problem could be using it;  I'm not an expert of internalization
> AS> and character codes but I could create a cirillic font for you (it's
> AS> easy) and you can try it out to see what happens... mh?
> 
> creating such a font isn't the problem (there are different character code
> tables for the cyrillic alphabet, though). vdr should be able to select a
> different font file depending on the selected language first.
> 
> if you're going to implement such a functionality, I could test it and
> write the Russian i18n.c entries.
> 
> I think, the font selection should be done on a per-string basis. just
> imagine some new constants in i18n.c which don't have a translation - they
> would have to be displayed in english then (with a standard font)

Oh my gosh!
Can you imagine the amount of font fiddling with this??

If a language needs a different font, that can be set when the language is
switched, but after that the font remains set. Changing fonts for every string
would IMHO cause an unnecessary overhead. After all, if a translation _is_
missing, it should be added anyway.

I haven't dome much with fonts and character sets yet, so maybe my understanding
of this is incomplete. Isn't it so that with all these ISO8859-* sets the lower
128 characters are always standard ASCII, and the upper 128 characters are language
specific? So an English text would always be displayed correctly.
Or is there more to it?

Klaus
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Klaus Schmidinger                       Phone: +49-8635-6989-10
CadSoft Computer GmbH                   Fax:   +49-8635-6989-40
Hofmark 2                               Email:   kls@cadsoft.de
D-84568 Pleiskirchen, Germany           URL:     www.cadsoft.de
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