[Bf-committers] UTF8 text input status (on OS X)

[Campbell Barton]

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Alexandr Kuznetsov <kuzsasha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
>
>> c) Typing with dead keys (e.g. ¨ + o => ö) didn't work for me. I
>> managed to get it working using NSTextInput, patch here if people want
>> to test, I'm not very confident that this doesn't break something, so
>> some testing would be great: http://www.pasteall.org/25983/diff
>>
>
> I think this problem is much bigger here. The dead keys are typed before a
> real key, but the composed UTF chars are store in the reverse order. Even
> if we have a  buffer for that, it won't solve many problems. For example
> Chines and Japanese inputs require more closer interaction with the text,
> rather than simply typing character. Different input methods exist for
> different languages which are natively supported by OS. But because Blender
> doesn't use native text fields, they must be  implemented by ourselves. For
> example, MS Pinpyin replaces typed latin characters into chinese when the
> whole word is complete. Therefore Blender must expose more text interface
> to Ghost. Ghost must be able to get the current line, cursor, visual
> position of editing text and then push edited text back. I probably can
> take care of this project, but it won't be until end of December. Plus I
> don't know any hieroglyphics languages.
> There is multiple cross platform implementations of IME. When we were
> discussing this with JesterKing, he proposed to use SDL. But although it
> might have ready solution, it is probably hard to integrate in our Ghost,
> as all SDL must have its own loop.
> (Anyway, when IME will be implemented, we might get speech recognition and
> handwriting for free!!)

If you want to test SDL text input you could try WITH_GHOST_SDL to
build ghost against SDL rather then x11/win/cocoa.
SDL1.3 has a Text Input event, but the text editing state needs to be
set first so you're right that ghost would need to be aware and have
some equivalent to SDL_StartTextInput / SDL_StopTextInput, rather then
just passing events like it does now.

> a) Uppercases character umlaut (e.g. Ü) are not rendered correctly in
>> the user interface, they do show in 3D text and the text editor.
>> Appears to be a text rendering problem that would happen on all
>> platforms?
>>
>
> Yes. It is a problem on Windows also. Moreover it is a problem exist with
> precomposed characters. Maybe it is problem of clipping? Anyway, maybe it
> is good time to switch char render library as was discussed earlier to
> support bidirectional text. Maybe there are more latent problem with the
> rendering of hard characters like Chinese or multiple compositions.
>
> Best Regards,
> Alex

-- 
- Campbell