World: r3wp

You're right

That is actually Hiragana -  a Japanese syllabary

Good job we didn't let this error propagate ... otherwise we might 
get 1billion complaints!  :)

Actually, when I looked at the katakana showed here, i felt something 
weird (yeah, back in the time, I learned them)
I couldn't remember the 5th one.
then, I checked (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana)
Eh ! Right in the spot. (Wi) is not used anymore.

Cool - that is kind of milestone for View apps - finally being able 
to display more than one charset :-) As for spacing needed, that 
is not problem of View unicode support, or is it?

Kerning .. who's responsibility?

and tracking

Hey guys, don't be so picky ;) about the test text strings. I only 
cut'n'pasted random chars from some of these pages http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/#links
that's all.

I personally don't plan to spend time on all the 'unicode normalization' 
and other tricky stuff and details. It seems there is enough linguistic 
experts even for tibetan script! So I'll kindly left that part as 
an exercise to the comunity :-P

OK, and what can be done to get more quality to the font display?

BTW, the "Chinese" example is taken from this http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cjk_compatibility.html
which should be chinese/japanese/korean. I'm really not expert in 
this(nor I would like to be) so I just hope I haven't created any 
offending word from the random chars in some of the language :)

so, it's all a mixture :)

what can be done to get more quality to the font display?

 I personally would make research about the technique McSeem(AGG author) 
 published in his well known font rendering related article and tried 
 to use the core idea of his demo application for making 'production 
 quality' version which can be then used in the HostKit code base.

How does the baseline get set?

I'm wondering if the Tibetan baseline should be at the top and not 
the bottom

cyphre... seems like the best plan, for the best quality font rendering 
on any platform  :-)

Graham, sorry, I really don't know the rules how code points in Unicode 
should be positioned. That needs to be studied and corrrections being 
made in the text rendering/layouting loop. Just a note, even now 
the text rendering/layouting code ismore than 50Kb of C++ code so 
either someone needs to study all the Unicode rules and make new 
replacement or publish patches to the current version.

oh well, at least it means omeone from tibet can study the C++ source 
:)

Maxim, yes I agree. But currently I have plenty of other tasks with 
higher priority so unles something changes this needs to wait or 
someone else needs to contribute.

So, does this mean these chars render inside a text field and we 
can backspace, del etc?

Graham, teeling the truth I'm glad I can write Czech chars properly 
(yes I'm selfish in that case :)) and I don't care about the details 
of oter scripts unless I need them ;)

But seriously, even if you don't know C++ it should be theoreticaly 
even write own positioning of the chars in the RICHTEXT dialect at 
Rebol level.

yes, all these chars are treated as any other chars in the RICHTEXT 
dialect so you can format it, select, edit.

so where can we download this?  :)

I guess all these gfx changes will be part of the next official HostKit 
release.

font quality code - that will have to be done one day, as the View 
app font quality is really not nice. So let's hope that one day it 
will move up in the priority list :-)

(I still need to do a few changes before handing it over to Carl)

Cyphre - what's next on your part? Effect pipeline?

Yes, effects are next on the list. Hope I'll get to them during today.

What's the mechanism of selecting a different charset ?  Just windows 
??

There is no charset selection. You just provide valid UTF-8 codes 
for the appropriate unicode chars, thats all. Also ofcourse you need 
to have font that contains that chars. I was using 'Arial Unicode 
MS' font in the test screens which is a huge font containing big 
chunk from all the unicode pages.

so you can't just type Czech at the keyboard?

maybe you can type Czech, but you have to somehow "convert" from 
local codepage to the Unicode on the go (as you type?) :-) Sorry 
for my very basic understanding of how things might work :-)

I guess you can as the key events will give you that nuicode chars 
you are typing (if your OS supports unicode) but this was not tested 
yet. I'll try it today.

...because R3 already supports char! values bigger than 255 so this 
should work transparent IMO

did you ever figure out how to create GUI event from inside a network 
protocol?

eg. for the purposes of updating a progress face

I did that in R2 so I suppose it works also in R3?

How ?

How about a bounty for the text rendering?


To be honest I don't care to much about better quality at the moment. 
We need a way to display text and some formatting (which works) and 
special chars like Umlauts. That's good-enough for us to use R3 for 
commercial development. Optimal text-rendering is nice to have but 
invest to do it must be covered by some revenue first.

The bounty is possible - but who has the skills to do the real work 
apart from Cyphre? :-) And also - how many man-days approximatelly 
would it take? (research plus implementation).

Who knows how long it takes... anybody complaining about the look 
has a chance to find out.

that contradicts the bounty mechanism, and is typical example of 
bold opinion, which burries and always burried REBOL down ...

No it doesn't contradict nothing. I'm not against bounties at all. 
I'm just against people who complain that first version doesn't do 
everything they want.

Where's the link to the rich text dialect that Richard was talking 
about?

Graham: http://rebol.net/wiki/Richtext

it's probably a good idea to create a wiki page regarding all the 
discovered issues around unicode in View. that way, it's easier to 
create a community project around it.

bounty: This won't cover the total-costs, but it's an additional 
sponsoring from the community that Cyphre can work on it.

Graham: regarding the 'updating GUI from network protocol' question

I have found some older scripts I did and quickly added the progressbar 
to it so you should see how it works.
You can download it from here:
http://www.rebol.cz/cyphre/scripts/r3/net/client.r3
and
http://www.rebol.cz/cyphre/scripts/r3/net/server.r3


just run server and client on localhost and press enter in the client 
console to see how the server shows the progress of upload.

Cyphre, the server link gives a 404

AdrianS: give it another try...it is highly possible Pekr's Apache 
instalation on this server is bugged so sometimes the links works 
and sometimes not ;)