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

[Diego Hernan Borghetti]

On Sun, 1 Mar 2009, joe wrote:

> I work on a unicode text editor at work, and I can say, it's pretty
> complicated.  You need a surprising amount of infrastructure code for
> fully supporting unicode; it's a big pain.  For example, in some
> languages a logical character may take up more then one unicode code
> point (the so-called grapheme clusters), for e.g. certain accented
> characters or arabic scripts.  And remember, there are still surrogate
> code points (for code points larger then 65,535) in UTF16, even if
> they're not common.
>
> I think we could still use UTF8; UTF16 is really only nice because you

Yes and blenfont already do that, all the string are UTF-8 (I go to add 
the documentation when I finish with the bmfont) but yes, used utf-8 to 
show text is one things, and "full-edit" the text another.

> can sometimes treat every character unit (whar_t array item) as a
> codepoint, but that still doesn't always work, and it's kindof a pain
> having to constantly convert from one to the other.
>
> We'd have to handle grapheme clusters in some way; clusters consist of
> a base code point, that's modified by subsequent ones.  We could
> probably ignore the modifiers, and only render the base character.
> Pango supports rendering grapheme clusters, I think, but it comes with
> a glib dependancy.
>
> For more information, see
> http://books.google.com:2/books?id=wn5sXG8bEAcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=unicode+demystified
> that book and http://unicode.org/
>
> Joe
>
> On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Brecht Van Lommel <brecht at blender.org> wrote:
>> 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 "?????????????". 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.
>>
>>
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-- 
 			Diego