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From: erik@sravd.sra.JUNET (Erik M. van der Poel)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Language dependent application defaults
Keywords: Localization, Application Defaults
Message-ID: <1462@sragwa.sra.co.jp>
Date: 17 Feb 90 14:29:56 GMT
References: <898@ztivax.UUCP> <3890@srava.sra.co.jp> <2803@bacchus.dec.com>
Sender: news@sragwa.sra.co.jp
Reply-To: erik@sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel)
Organization: Software Research Associates, Inc., Japan
Lines: 64


In article <3890@srava.sra.co.jp> I write:
<But let's get down to the point here. The X/Open catgets catalogues
<are only for multilingual text, while app-defaults files are for all
<sorts of resources including e.g. border width. So I suppose what you
<are trying to say is that we should keep language-dependent files in
<one place, specified by the environment variable NLSPATH. We could
<achieve this by keeping only language-independent files under
</usr/lib/X11/app-defaults. But I imagine that the Xt people decided to
<put language-dependent files under the app-defaults directory too
<because X/Open is not the only standard out there. In AT&T's MNLS, for
<example, the internationalized files are under /lib/locale. Somebody
<correct me if I'm wrong. What about POSIX? And others?

In article <2803@bacchus.dec.com> asente@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Asente) writes:
> Close, but there's more to it.

Yes, you're right, there's a lot more to it. What we've discussed so
far is just the tip of the iceberg. And what follows won't get us much
further either, but I want to continue the discussion...


> You really need to customize more resources than just strings (fonts,

Here in Japan, the X applications that are used daily (terminal
emulators, editors, etc) usually use 2 fonts: font (for English) and
kanjiFont (for Japanese). I suppose the Chinese would also want to
have 2 fonts, while the Europeans could probably get by with one font,
using 8-bit characters (umlaut, etc). So the number of fonts depends
on the type of text. This area needs standardization.


> widget sizes,

Widget sizes? As in width and height in pixels?

I have seen several programs that specify sizes of widgets that
contain text, and the result is that the text gets truncated on
displays that have very small dots. Users on such displays tend to
choose fonts with many dots for legibility.

Application programmers should not specify the sizes of such widgets.
Instead, they should let the user choose a font and let the widget
choose it's own `best' size. After that the programmer can adjust the
widgets so that, for example, all the buttons are the same size.
Better yet, the programmer could throw a composite widget around the
buttons so that they are automatically aligned.

(This message is not directed at you, Paul. :-)


> printing direction...)

There is some support for this in X already: a negative character
width causes the next character to be printed to the left of the
current character. Vertical printing is not directly supported,
though. Top-to-bottom printing could be achieved by drawing the text
one character at a time, in a vertical fashion. So one would need
resources to specify vertical printing.


Erik M. van der Poel                  erik@sra.co.jp             (Japan)
SRA, 1-1-1 Hirakawa-cho, Chiyoda-ku   erik%sra.co.jp@uunet.uu.net  (USA)
Tokyo 102 Japan. TEL +81-3-234-2692   erik%sra.co.jp@mcvax.uucp (Europe)