Older blog entries for rbrady (starting at number 30)

What's the problem with witchburning censorship anyway? I don't see why anyone should expect to be allowed to broadcast their witchburning exploits.

Spent much time last night trying to figure out why the persion translation for gtk2 wasn't working on Red Hat 7.0, and ended up discovering that this was due to UTF-8 being in lowercase instead of uppercase. This was then causing glibc2.2 to try and convert it from latin1 to UTF-8, when it was already in UTF-8. Madness ensued.

Argh!

Bidi xterm hacking going well, should be feature-complete by the end of the month.

Er, that's about it really.

Starting to add support to Xterm for bidi. This is making my head hurt. (well, metaphorically)

Made a nifty little panel applet that uses xkb to figure out an appropriate flag for the current keygroup, with no configuration required at all. Ported my Hindi/Bengali keymaps to Xkb format. Now pondering how to get Xkb to combine arbritrary combinations (e.g. say I wanted a three-mode Russian/Hindi/English layout, how could I do that without editing a config file?)

Xterm & bidi

Spent quite some time staring at the ECMA specification for how-to-do-bidi-in-a-terminal and failing to understand it.

Can we have less flamewars in the diary entries please?

Thanks.

Excellent - I now have a modified version of Slang which uses an array of wchar_t for each character, and compiles and links and everything. And, better, it even seems to work. Now to get it to output UTF-8...

Started trying to port SLang curses implementation to be able to deal with wide characters. It's highly confusing, but not as confusing as ncurses. Hopefully, lessons learnt in porting slcurses will be transferrable to ncurses.

Mud

Ages ago (well, in 97-99), I was part of the development team of the Cryosphere, a SciFi mud. I dropped out of this due to the pressures of university, and I got interested in other stuff (the Unicode stuff, as it happens). By February 1999, it had died.

Eighteen months later, it has been resurrected (by some folks who were high-ups in Attempt #2). And I now have some free time. So I've joined again. We have now, (which we failed to have in 1999), a vision, which we can get to through a series of incremental steps - and when we get there, it will rock.

There was fixing of yet more xterm bugs! At least these were mainly ones I introduced, so therefore I could find them. :-) Also much hacking on a new Gujarati renderer, which can share something like 90% of the code with the Devanagari renderer. Started making an appropriate font. Progress slow due to not being able to read Gujarati.

Today

Stared lots at Gujarati glyphs and managed to cobble together a couple of fonts that work. These have gone into CVS.

Other indic hacking - I'm making all the Indic renderers indicate invalid sequences better, and share more code between them. And some other bits and pieces.

Got some feedback re: the Devanagari renderer and keymaps. They work! (Apart from some minor glitches in the keymap). Hopefully this means gtk HEAD will get translated into Hindi soon.

The Future

I've arranged to go to the main UK office next week. Looking forward to this, as I finally get to meet my boss.

Signed the contract yesterday, so I'm now officially employed. :) Um, yay!

Xterm

Most of today was spent tracking down bugs in xterm. I fixed the combining-doublewide characters interaction problem and the consequent U+FFFF getting mangled issue, and some potential security issues wrt the UTF-8 decoder.

The Killer Bug was the recently-tracked-down CutBuffer problem. It's all icky and complicated, but related to the fact that Xterm is exporting cutbuffers in UTF-8 and then importing them in Latin1. This is clearly wrong, but no-one seems to know the right answer. I suspect I will make it so it converts the exported strings to Latin1, as that, whilst not good, is several million times better than the current behaviour, which is of no use to anyone.

Some people have been recently talking about free Unicode fonts. It might interesting them to learn of the ucs- fonts project - which has extended many standard X11 fonts to a decent Unicode range. Soon, the -Adobe- pixel fonts will also be ready to a quite large range.

If you have XFree86 4.0, you already have these fonts, and a UTF-8 supporting xterm. Just type "xterm -u8 -fn 9x18u" and lo! This doesn't support CJK or combining characters, but you can get a patch for that, which hopefully will be integrated into the standard Xterm soon.

Obviously this doesn't support Indic scripts, however works in ongoing on support for Indic scripts in Pango, and will hopefully be ready for 1.0, along with a decent selection of pixel fonts for : Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Burmese, Gujarati, Oriya, and possibly other scripts.

OpenType support is more confusing, and something I'd prefer not to have to do on my own. If anyone is interested in collaborating on this issue, I'd strongly recommend getting on the appropriate mailing lists, including fonts@xfree86, and the linux-utf8.

Some folk also might be interested to learn a stab at a free TrueType font editor exits. The main thing missing from this is hinting. All that is needed for OpenType is editors for Numerous Tables.