Re: [MiNT] XaAES multi-language help needed

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On sunnuntai 16 tammikuu 2011, Christos Tziotzis wrote:
> English wouldn't be affected  but all other languages will be. I believe
> utf should be handled by the application that needs it (text editors,
> word processors, browsers etc) and not by the OS.
> The problem comes when you want the atari to interact with other
> computers offline and online in a non english language. It's impossible
> for me to post greek in a greek forum for example.

If it's a www-forum, that's a Browser problem, not OS one I think.

I think all mainstream browsers do their text handling on their own as they
need different text layouting than what widget toolkits provide and need to
be cross platform (and different OSes use different unicode standards).

HTML and email standards both include settings for encodings, so if Atari
end works according to standard, the other ends shouldn't have trouble
reading your posts.

Atari end on needs to run the text through encoding translation for which
there should be a lot of example code available as open source.


> Text files are also
> non interchangeable. I am also uncertain whether using ISO encodings
> will actually help on that when it comes to online activities but they
> will work for the exchange of files (I have tested converting atari
> greek to iso through a translator program and the conversion worked and
> I could read the text on my PC).

I think it's better done through translation when sending & receiving
the messages (which the corresponding frontend program should automate).

Using 16-bit character encodings or UTF-8 would mean that text editing would
take more memory and be slower than when done with 8-bit Atari encodings.
I think that makes the added complexity of unicode<->8-bit encoding
handlings (which these programs anyway need to handle) worth the trouble.


	. Eero