[mcclim-devel] another question

[Robert Strandh]

 > I have another question:
 > 
 > * What's the state of unicode support with McCLIM. I guess this is  
 > backend specific, since SBCL supports unicode strings very nicely. I  
 > use McCLIM on Mac OS X and non ASCII keys don't produce anything in  
 > McCLIM. Perhaps this is a problem with Mac OS X's X11 server? I've  
 > looked into 'freetype' font rendering and (I think) it assumes that  
 > char-code is < 256. Is there any unicode support in McCLIM?

There are two distinct issues, input and output. 

Output is relatively easy.  If we use mcclim-freetype or
mcclim-truetype, things work fine it seems.  You just need a Unicode
font with all the glyphs.  For native X11 (bitmap I guess) fonts, it
is more complicated, because such fonts are limited to 16-bit glyph
numbers, so we need a system for creating groups of fonts and choices
of fonts depending on code points that would render in a pleasant way,
and I am told this is hard because it depends on the language.

Input is trickier and depends on the backend.  Our current problem is
that the CLX backend doesn't support the XKEYBOARD extension (I am
just repeating what others have told me here), so the McCLIM CLX
backend doesn't either.  Perhaps the good thing to do is to extend CLX
with XKEYBOARD support.

Regards,
-- 
Robert Strandh

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