[Bf-taskforce25] Keyboard Input in Blender 2.5. (Re: SVN commit[19148]: Text Editor back.)

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi Nathan,

On Sun, 2009-03-01 at 22:31 +0200, Nathan Letwory wrote:
> > * A monospace truetype font was added, since that is needed for
> >  the text editor. It's Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. This is the
> >  default gnome terminal font, but it doesn't fit entirely well
> >  with the other font I think, can be changed easily of course.
> 
> I think it would be wise here to add a Unicode-capable font right from
> the first release. This will immediately cut down any potential bug
> reports about those characters not showing. I already tested with both
> typing directly into the text editor and by loading a simple test.txt
> containing the string "äöåÄÖŵ°ëéèôñ". On loading the test.txt simple
> nothing got printed.

The font has these special characters. It is the text editor that can
only work with ascii strings currently.

> > * Operators:
> >    * Insert
> 
> Related to the font and input is that we'll have to look into handling
> deadcharacter stuff (to be decided where to handle properly, GHOST?
> Event/WM manager?).
> 
> This is important, since some characters on different layouts are done
> through keycombinations ie, AltGr+9 for ] (AltGr being the right
> Alt-key) and ie. AltGr+r for the ^-character in text editor. The
> latter for instance currently will trigger the SCREEN_OT_area_rip
> operator. Clearly this isn't desirable :)
> 
> This is something that will not only affect text editor, it will
> affect the whole of Blender: text fields and hotkeys being the obvious
> victims.

Indeed, there was some talk about this earlier on the mailing list. The
WM module seems like the right place to do it. The text editor then
isn't a good place to test that functionality at the moment but the 3d
text objects do support more characters.

Not sure how much work it would be to get unicode support in the text
editor .. converting all arrays to something like a wchar_t may not be
too hard. We need a convention on what to use when, both utf-8 and
wchar_t have advantages and disadvantages.

Brecht.