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Re: Full unicode support for back-xlib (2)


From: Fred Kiefer
Subject: Re: Full unicode support for back-xlib (2)
Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 14:15:16 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021204

Kazunobu Kuriyama wrote:
Thank you for reading the code very carefully and extensively.

This is what we should do a lot more, normally we don't have the time for it, but this time I owe it to you.

Fred Kiefer wrote:
 > <snip>
 > - As XGFontSetEnumerator is currently not implemented I would remove
 > all reverences to it.

(Reading references for reverences,)
At first, I declared XGFontSetEnumerator without implementation, and
then I got an exception telling me that enumerateFontsAndFamilies should
be overridden.  So I put the stub of it to make the module work.
This is the only reason I did it.  If the declaration is unnecessary and
is the cause of throwing the exception, your suggestion is helpful to make
the implementation better.

I meant to remove the whole class until there is real code for it.

 > - My man pages warn about the use of the funtion strtok(). Why not
 > pass into load_font_set() the NSString and use
 > [componentsSeparatedByString:] (This method is also use in the
 > font_chacher.m)?

I guess your man pages tell you that strtok() modifies a given
original string, replacing a delimiter with a whitespace. Because
the current implmenetation invokes strtok() against a copy of the
original string, not the original one, I don't think the warning
makes the case.

It is even worse, the man page says:

BUGS
       Never use these functions. If you do, note that:
              These functions modify their first argument.
              These functions cannot be used on constant strings.
              The identity of the delimiting character is lost.
              The  strtok()  function  uses a static buffer while
              parsing, so it's not thread safe. Use strtok_r() if
              this matters to you.

I don't think that this could cause any harm in your case, still I would avoid it.

I intentionally and extensively make use of the C library functions
over there because of efficiency.  As you can see, we need many
system calls and communications with the X server there, which
inevitably and significantly make programs crawl.  If this does
not make sense, I agree to the opinion that use of NSString would
be better.

As you said, there are a lot of X calls involced, which may take some time, therefor it should not be to bad to work with ObjC objects in the rest of the code, as they are most certainly faster than the X calls.

Though the current code might look a bad programming style, I think
it is the right place to compromise.

I was also worried about the special treatment you do for missing add styles, as I can tell from the fonts installed on my machine almost any part of a XLFD may be missing, this should not cause any special treatment.


>  > In this part of the code I am also a bit unsure about the pieces of
>  > the XLFD that you use and the ones you discard. Could you explain,
>  > document what you do and why? (For example, I would use the family and
>  > discard the foundry, you do the opposit)

As for the latter question: People can't expect every font on the earth
has the family property called 'Helvetica', 'Courier' or something
else which is taken for granted in Latin characters, while they can find
fonts with the foundry property such as 'Adobe' and 'fixed'..  The
current implementation reflects this reality.

(Because I thought this was a common knowledge, I didn't document
 it in detail.  This gives another example that people always think
 their own ways as 'the' standard, doesn't this?)

Are you saying that for Asian fonts there is no such thing as a font family? Or do they just have different names not Helvetica, which is what I would expect. We seem to have a real problem here. On my machine I have about 10 different fonts from Adobe installed (of course each with dozens of styles and sizes). They have a totally different appearance and I never would want to mix them when displaying a string. Whereas I would not mind to mix Helvetica coming from different sources. Your current implementation of building up font sets would be rather unusable for any European language user (probably even for US Americans, but you never can tell), as this would merge fonts that don't belong together.


 > - What we could also think of is to make the switch between your and
 > the standard implementation of font handling one at runtime. Allowing
 > for a simpler transistion without recompiling the backend each time.
 > See the user default for the use of the XFT fonts.
 >

I'd like it if the development team would allow me to do so.  I guess we
need a new boolean user default value, say, GSEnableXFontSet or
GSXEnableFontSet (or, FontSet may be replaced with MultiByte).
Could you suggest me a better name?

These two names sound fine for me, the later is perhaps a bit closer to what we have there already. Go ahead and add this, but dont forget to document it in back/Documentation/Back/DefaultsSummary.gsdoc. I think for the start the default should be NO, but we may change this as this option gets tested more.

Cheers
Fred





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