[sword-devel] Personal Commentaries / Unicode input methods

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Christian Renz wrote:
>> correctly. However in the personal commentary, the Thai book name was not
>> displayed correctly (upper ANSI characters instead).
> 
> 
> That is a different issue -- the personal commentary does not seem to
> be able to deal with Unicode at the moment. Give them guys some time :-)

Thanks for the encouragement, Christian.  I tried to see if there was a 
quick fix for this problem.  I reproduced the problem once by pasting 
from an Arabic module into the personal commentary.  I did, indeed, see 
upper ascii values.  Then when I went to edit the same entry, it display 
Arabic.  Then when I went to save, it display Arabic!  Not sure the 
silliness that's going on, but I think you can save unicode entries in 
the personal commentary, right now, if you play with it a bit.

Having said that, we added a series of classes ported from our Java code 
for the stuff we did with Project Leningradensis.  These classes will 
allow selection of alternate keyboard mappings for various unicode 
ranges.  We have a couple different Hebrew mappings written, and it is 
quite easy to add additional mappings.  Hopefully we'll actually get 
them wired up for the personal commentary stuff soon.  Anyone that wants 
  to try their hand at this is welcome.  The classes are in the source 
sword/src/frontend/im (input methods).  Actually, just checked and we 
only ported on of the Hebrew input methods-- the Michigan Claremont 
mappings.  But it should be enough to start with.  The other mappings 
are in the jsword repository.

Hope this helps and gives you an idea of where we were planning on going 
with support for other language input methods.  Please let us know your 
ideas and comments on this.

	Thanks,
		-Troy.



> 
>> I don't know how it is possible to properly display International 
>> languages
>> in a program as it moves across different Windows platforms. It is 
>> extremely
>> difficult without having multiple versions for different OS's. (Thanks 
>> MS.)
> 
> 
> For search lists, dictionary keywords, bible texts etc.: The program
> needs to handle outputting Unicode itself, that is: draw e.g. the
> drop-down boxes itself instead of letting Windows handle that. Tedious
> work that Troy thankfully mostly completed.
> 
> For menus, dialog boxes etc.: It probably *could* be done (menus also
> support owner-draw items), but it is quite tedious as well. I think we
> won't see general support for any lcoale on an english version of
> Windows soon in sword. Especially since I don't think it's worth the
> effort -- I can see how one wants to use e.g. Thai bible texts,
> Chinese dictionaries, Greek entries in the Personal commentary, and
> search for Hebrew text; but if you are having an english version of
> WIndows, you should be able to deal with english dialogs and menus.
> 
> Greetings,
>   Christian
>