tlug: Multilingual input (was Re: Japanese input)

[Klaus Kudielka <kudielka@example.com>]

Hello,

I renamed the subject again ;)
The system I am dreaming of should handle as many languages as possible, without
having to re-start applications (ideally, they shouldn't even know about the
language/charset/encoding etc. if they don't like).

I'm very excited about this and may even do some programming. OTOH, I admit that
I haven't looked into the GTK multilingual support yet. I just compiled it with
XIM support, tried a few sample applications (of course with LANG set), but
shift-space didn't bring up my kinput2 :-(

IMHO, as a first step, we should discuss the APIs between an application and the
GUI. A few questions which come to my mind immediately:

1. Shall the {input API, display API, C library multi-byte functions} support
   arbitrary encodings (specified by the locale) or just one universal encoding
   (e.g. UTF-8)? 3 questions, but, to keep application complexity
   low, there should be only 1 answer.
2. For the multi-byte conversion functions, matters are even more complex. Does
   the wchar_t specify the  Universal Character Set (UCS) or the local character
   set (i.e. the one corresponding to the encoding)? I assume it's UCS, since
   some encodings (like ISO-2022-JP-2) can have multiple (overlapping?) 
   character sets. The Single UNIX Specification, Version 2, only states that
   the behaviour is affected by the LC_CTYPE category, but not in what way.
   Does anyone have more information?
3. Concerning (1) and (2), what's the status/direction for the current APIs?
   - XIM
   - GNOME
   - glibc (I know the status of 2.0.7: UCS-4 <-> UTF-8 only)

When we have decided upon this issue, we can actually start hacking on the
various subsystems.

--
Klaus Kudielka			     Communications Research Laboratory
Tel. ++81-42-327-6494				  Nukui-Kitamachi 4-2-1
Fax. ++81-42-327-6699			 Koganei, Tokyo 184-8795, Japan
E-mail kudielka@example.com	  http://www.nt.tuwien.ac.at/~kkudielk/
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