[Bf-committers] International Input

[Matt Ebb]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 1:20 AM, Ignacio Fernandez Moreno
<hellmoon666 at gmail.com> wrote:
> What would be needed to add International Input Support to blender? This
> will apply mainly to the text editor and the Text object since it may be
> better to avoid special characters in text inputs (so text sould be
> converted when pasting text there).

Hi, this is a very tricky situation for blender, pretty much all
internal strings (object names, text datablocks) are stored in ASCII
char and it would be an enormous undertaking to change that.

I'm not familiar with the key codes issues much (eg. exclamation mark
on french keyboards) but maybe if there is a simple way to convert key
codes to ascii in only certain situations (eg. text editor, text field
editing) that might work. Any further than that though, for example
adding IME support to Blender, would be very difficult.

I think in the meantime, a good, doable short term target would be to
get international text display working, rather than input. This would
have several benefits including restoring interface (i.e. operator
name/property) translations back to at least a blender 2.4 level, and
also displaying international characters in the file browser -
searching for a file with a Japanese filename is impossible, for
example. As far as I understand, the text drawing code already
supports UTF/wchar input so it's a much more practical goal to aim for
first.

If anyone is interested in working on this, I'm happy to help out,
please get in touch with me.

cheers,

Matt