[vwnc] Unicode Support and Fonts

Will the next release (7.7) of VisualWorks contain Unicode support
that ”just works”? We did some attempt to support Unicode in our
Windows-based application, but hit a few bugs in VisualWorks and in
our own methods that stores text on the database. Supporting Unicode
is not important right now, and we decided to postpone this feature.

We do not want to internationalize the product, we simply want user to
be able to enter any character as input and display those strings.
Among the languages we want to support are most European languages,
Russian, Korean, Malaysian, Japanese and Chinese (do not know which
Chinese variant yet).

We probably want to use a single font that includes all languages.
Some fonts, like Segoe UI, do not include support for Asian languages.
Microsoft supplies other fonts for these languages
(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511282.aspx), but we do not
want to mess around with changing the font on the fly.

The following pages list a few fonts and their support for various
Unicode Blocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_fonts
>From the table I recon we need to use Arial Unicode MS.

Has Cincom tested supporting a large set of Unicode characters in a
single VisualWorks Windows application? Have you any recommendations
on how to do this? Will a single font work, or do I need multiple
fonts, and switch between them?

Kind regards
Runar Jordahl

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I think "Just works" is perhaps a high expectation, but we're certainly aiming for "works" on Windows in this release :-)

One of the significant things upcoming in this release is switching completely over to using the Windows "wide" APIs, using UTF-16 throughout. That will make many Unicode issues significantly easier. Another task is having a much (MUCH) larger set of locales, and decoupling the locale from the encoding.

Right now we actually can't use the Unicode fonts, and that's something we definitely want to work, but it's work in progress at the moment, so I'm reluctant to commit to it being ready for the release.  It does seem likely to me that if you have a single font which can support all the characters you want, you should be fine using that font.

At 04:59 AM 5/7/2009, Runar Jordahl wrote:

Will the next release (7.7) of VisualWorks contain Unicode support
that ”just works”? We did some attempt to support Unicode in our
Windows-based application, but hit a few bugs in VisualWorks and in
our own methods that stores text on the database. Supporting Unicode
is not important right now, and we decided to postpone this feature.

We do not want to internationalize the product, we simply want user to
be able to enter any character as input and display those strings.
Among the languages we want to support are most European languages,
Russian, Korean, Malaysian, Japanese and Chinese (do not know which
Chinese variant yet).

We probably want to use a single font that includes all languages.
Some fonts, like Segoe UI, do not include support for Asian languages.
Microsoft supplies other fonts for these languages
( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511282.aspx), but we do not
want to mess around with changing the font on the fly.

The following pages list a few fonts and their support for various
Unicode Blocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_fonts
>From the table I recon we need to use Arial Unicode MS.

Has Cincom tested supporting a large set of Unicode characters in a
single VisualWorks Windows application? Have you any recommendations
on how to do this? Will a single font work, or do I need multiple
fonts, and switch between them?

Kind regards
Runar Jordahl

_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc

_______________________________________________
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Oh, the other thing I should say is that we do not currently support, and do not expect to support in the next release, display and editing of bidirectional languages.

At 10:24 AM 5/7/2009, Alan Knight wrote:

I think "Just works" is perhaps a high expectation, but we're certainly aiming for "works" on Windows in this release :-)

One of the significant things upcoming in this release is switching completely over to using the Windows "wide" APIs, using UTF-16 throughout. That will make many Unicode issues significantly easier. Another task is having a much (MUCH) larger set of locales, and decoupling the locale from the encoding.

Right now we actually can't use the Unicode fonts, and that's something we definitely want to work, but it's work in progress at the moment, so I'm reluctant to commit to it being ready for the release.  It does seem likely to me that if you have a single font which can support all the characters you want, you should be fine using that font.

At 04:59 AM 5/7/2009, Runar Jordahl wrote:

Will the next release (7.7) of VisualWorks contain Unicode support
that ”just works”? We did some attempt to support Unicode in our
Windows-based application, but hit a few bugs in VisualWorks and in
our own methods that stores text on the database. Supporting Unicode
is not important right now, and we decided to postpone this feature.

We do not want to internationalize the product, we simply want user to
be able to enter any character as input and display those strings.
Among the languages we want to support are most European languages,
Russian, Korean, Malaysian, Japanese and Chinese (do not know which
Chinese variant yet).

We probably want to use a single font that includes all languages.
Some fonts, like Segoe UI, do not include support for Asian languages.
Microsoft supplies other fonts for these languages
( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511282.aspx), but we do not
want to mess around with changing the font on the fly.

The following pages list a few fonts and their support for various
Unicode Blocks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_fonts
>From the table I recon we need to use Arial Unicode MS.

Has Cincom tested supporting a large set of Unicode characters in a
single VisualWorks Windows application? Have you any recommendations
on how to do this? Will a single font work, or do I need multiple
fonts, and switch between them?

Kind regards
Runar Jordahl

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[hidden email]
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--
Alan Knight [|], Engineering Manager, Cincom Smalltalk
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http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk
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