Re: UTF-8 support in the X Window System

From: Hideki Hiura (hiura@bakabon.eng.sun.com)
Date: Tue Jun 22 1999 - 16:21:43 EDT


> From: Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>
> Are here any engineers from X.Org companies such as Sun, HP, SCO, IBM, etc.
> who have a strong interest in seeing proper Unicode/UTF-8 support in the
> X11 protocol specification and in the Xlib sample implementation?

As one of architect of x-xi18n working group,I am curious which part
of X11 protocol do you think we need an update?

The sample implementation you can find in X11R6.x is a port of
an early experimental protytype of Solaris2.3 Unicode support.
There are certainly lots of room to improve.
I guess each X.Org companies have advanced X11R6.x sample
implementation to support complete Unicode, so there are numbers of
commercial X11R6 Unicode implementation, but due to the X Consortium's
merger with OpenGroup, such implementations had never been returned to
vanilla X11R6.x.

I do not know how many of the x i18n WG members are still
arround, but it may be worth it to ask for reactivation of WG for
this activity.

Note: as you may know, after the merger of X Consortium with OpenGroup,
the process of X standardization may be changed to comply with
the process of OpenGroup.

> - UTF-8 selections have the new UTF8_STRING type (because STRING is
> per definition only Latin-1 in the existing standard). This allows
> selection interoperability between Unicode and Latin-1 applications.

FYI: What X-i18n WG planned to support Unicode string right before X
Consortium was tapering out is to define CompoundText2, which directly
transfer UTF16.

Hideki HIURA, hideki.hiura@Sun.COM
Sun Microsystems Inc. Mountain View, CA.



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