Re: Hello world in UTF-8/X11

[Bruno Haible <haible@xxxxxxx>]

Manel de la Rosa writes:
> I don't need a complex rendering system or anything killer. Simply
> display a label with a UTF-8 encoded string.

This is a contradiction in itself.

The purpose of UTF-8 is that it can be used for languages from Russian
over Vietnamese to Indic. This needs a complex rendering engine: for
Russian you already need fonts in non-ISO-8859-1 encoding; for
Vietnamese you need to attach multiple accents to a single letter, and
for Indic (Devanagari etc.) you need vowel reordering. Not to mention
right-to-left reordering (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi), the problem of
choosing the right fonts, and dealing with the subtleties of these
fonts.

Only two free GUI toolkits have the rendering engines today: Qt/KDE
and GNOME. Also Mozilla and (to a more limited extent) GNU Emacs have
some rendering engines, but not embedded in a GUI toolkit.

With Motif/Lesstif you cannot go further than displaying Russian.
There are no internationalization efforts underway there. (Except
there is a complex rendering underway at the low X11 level, by Sun,
http://stsf.sourceforge.net/, but I have no idea how easy it will be
to use it when it will be finished, and whether the Motif adaptation
will be freely distributable.)

So my recommendation is: Drop Motif, and use KDE/Qt (if the GPL is
acceptable for your program) or GNOME. Qt has a module that helps in
migrating from Motif to Qt.

> with a short X11/UTF-8 "Hello World" example, for instance

Can't be done.

Bruno
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Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/