Will GTK be used in Openmoko?

Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) raster at openmoko.org
Fri May 16 10:09:22 CEST 2008


On Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:31 +0300 Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
babbled:

> > ok. excuse me. but i did not show any disrespect.
> Calling what I say "babbling" seems disrespectful to me.

it's automatic - everyone gets it. i'm asutralian by nature. in my culture it
it good natured fun. i am surprised that you took offense to what is obviously
a automated bit of text not actually typed in just for you to offend you. you
might get royally offended hanging out with aussies as they will always good
naturedly call eachother names and use very familiar language. i am saying this
because i could just go "oh - i will change to adapt to your culture" but at
the same time compromise my own. so please do not take offense at what is an
automated bit of template text that goes everywhere.

> > yes. indeed. if we do it by population or by country count. the MAJORITY
> > (most
> > - greater than 50%) use a language that DISPLAYS perfectly well left to
> > right 1 character at a time.
> I'll skip the rest of the email, because we really don't want to turn 
> this into a flame war.
> 
> Like I said, adding display support to a toolkit, especially where the 
> machine already has the required libraries, is a piece of cake.

not really. please tell me how you determine if you display right to left or
left to right where a paragraphi may be 50% roman and 50% arabic text? which
formatting method do you use? at what point do you change? how do you do
selections of text when you are selecting text dragging right to left then over
some quoted roman text that is left to right? there's a lot of gotchas.

> Answering Karsten, yes, if OpenMoko ends up using EFL, I will add BiDi 
> support to the display. I have done it before and know whats required. 
> It is NOT the display that worries me, and I have not seen you address 
> that point in my mail. I hate to see you disregard a need merely because 
> of emotional investment in a toolkit.

that is what i mentioned. input is another matter separate from display - they
have entirely separate code paths and systems, so i know i tackle them
separately.

> Operating a phone requires much more than merely displaying text. I 
> think it unsmart to not take that fact into consideration when choosing 
> a toolkit.

there are 2 halves to it. the fact is as-is right now you will get only roman
text input - on the gtk based om image as with anything else. you will need to
ADD support for anything else - and then hope it works ok. it hasn't gone
backwards. it's just gone sideways.

i still stand by the fact that the majority of people in the world - and by far
and wide the majority of people who will buy or own an openmoko produced phone,
will be right-to-left language users and the definite majority of those will
even be using basic latin text. our stats show just that.

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>




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