[gmpi] Re: GMPI req's draft 1 for review.
- From: Sébastien Métrot <meeloo@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2004 15:28:43 +0100
Steve Harris wrote:
On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 01:45:57 +1300, Jeff McClintock wrote:
HI,
My point is, both Windows and Mac API use 16bit UNICODE. If you pass my
plugin a 8bit string I've got to convert it, I've got to allocate memory
to hold the longer 16bit representation. Then if I need to pass it back
I've got to convert it back to multibyte.
Actually windows uses UTF-16, and I'm pretty sure OSX uses UTF-8 nativly.
No, Windows uses UCS-2. UTF-16 is a multibyte (variable length)
alternative to UTF-8 that works on 16 bits values instead of 8 but on
character may still be coded in 32, 48 or more bits. UCS-2 means *every*
character is coded on 16 bits. UCS-4 (the unix default for unicode)
means 32 bits by Character for *every* characters.
The problem with Other unicode coding than UTF-8 is that they are not
ASCII compatible which means that you'll need conversion routines a lot
if you want to continue using 8 bit APIs (think about the number of
dependecies one can get in a plugin: libjpeg, freetype2, libpng, zlib,
libsndfile, etc...). UTF-8 is much more legacy code friendly, even if
you still have some work to do to adapt your code without making
mistakes (glyph separation is a good example, as is hyphenation).
I've done quite a lot of Japanese, Chinese, Arab, Hebrew, Korean,
Russian localization at some point in my career. I personally found that
UTF-8 often is a good solution for existing code. If you master all the
build chain then wchar_t (UCS-2 on Mac and Win32, UCS-4 on unices) may
be a good solution but then you'll need unicode fonts and all that jazz.
Anyway I think it would be nice to have a set of basic character
encoding/decoding functions (a la iconv) in the API or in the supporting
libs because there is no multiplatform API for that. IConv is unix only
(to the extend of my knowledge), Win32 have 3 diferent APIs and MacOSX
has another completely diferent one...
Sebastien
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