plans for KDE4

[Lars Knoll]

Hi Ken,

On Sunday 04 July 2004 19:48, Ken Deeter wrote:
> May I suggest that  improvement the area of multi-lingualization should
> be major goal for KDE4.

I completely agree here. There are lots f places that are in need of 
improvements.

> Qt is going through some interesting changes right now (for example, a
> patch that allows GTK-like input method modules).

I really wouldn't call them GTK like. They are not bound to GTK and don't have 
any real close relation to GTK (at least not technically). They are basically 
client side input methods independent of the old XIM framework. 

> The other thing that needs to fixed, however, is the font system.
> Although I would say the majority of the problem comes from Qt's font
> substitution implementation, once that is fixed, KDE apps will need to
> be modified to ask for the right kinds of fonts.

Which problems are you talking about? A general statement like this doesn't 
really help. What I need to fix issues is concrete use cases and wishes as 
how things should behave.

> I'm working on a document to explain this but it essentially comes down
> to the fact that you need to have an API that lets an application ask
> for a font for some language (or more specifically script). This also
> means that many KDE apps will need to be modified to be aware of what
> language they are dealing with.

The Qt font dialog (since Qt 3.2) mostly allows this. There are limitations in 
the CJK range (we only show Han as a script and not Japanese, Simplified 
Chinese and Traditional Chinese). These should get fixed in 4.0.

> Some might think "just look at the locale" but its not quite that
> simple. For example, you may have an IRC program with different
> languages in each channel. Both may be using utf-8, but you want
> different fonts for each (especially if you are talking about
> Chinese/Japanese/Korean texts). You're locale may say use Japanese or
> wahtever, but for a Korean channel, using a Japanese font to render some
> characters may be incorrect.

This is independent of the font system. What you want is to be able to choose 
one font per channel. A Korean one for the korean channel a japanese font for 
the japanese channel.

> Although I'm not anywhere close to having the solution yet, I would like
> to point this problem out for KDE4. Gnome already gets this right (or at
> least more right, thanks to pango and fontconfig), and my guess is that
> since the majority of kde users are western, they may not notice it as
> much. It will likely be a change that requires the app developers to
> re-think their designs a bit, or at least re-work some configuration
> dialogs.

KDEs font dialog needs some rethinking here. But could you please be more 
specific about what Gnome gets right and we get wrong? 

> If anything, we need to get the message out to all the developers that
> unicode doesn't solve all your problems. Its a good step forward, but it
> introduces a lot of issues as well, and KDE/Qt needs to come up with
> some ways to deal with them.

The main issue I can see in Unicode is CJK unification and I assume that's 
what you're talking about. But this usually boils down to selecting the 
correct font for the language you want.

Best regards,
Lars