Will GTK be used in Openmoko?

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Thu, 15 May 2008 20:58:48 +0300 Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
babbled:

> Michael Shiloh wrote:
> > Have we made the decision then to officially move away from GTK? This 
> > was asked on the community list awhile ago, and IIRC there has been no 
> > "official" answer.
> >
> > Michael
> Sorry for coming in the middle of the thread like that. Just wanted to 
> point something out.
> 
> Moving from GTK to QT is well enough (though I do most of my GUI 
> programming using wxWidgets, and it has no native QT port). HOWEVER, if 
> we are considering moving away from the mainline toolkits altogether, 
> the question of "non-standard" languages must be addressed. By 
> "non-standard", I mean the BiDi languages (Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi) and 
> the CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean). I can tell you that 
> getting a new toolkit to support those at the same level as GTK and QT 
> does is a non-trivial task. I know that because all of the Wine BiDi 
> support was written by me, and I have very good knowledge of how little 
> is in there, and how much work it took.
> 
> Just something to keep in mind. The whole world does NOT use languages 
> that are written one letter at a time, left to right, one keypress at a 
> time.

indeed. but most of the world does use languages that for display purposes are
1 glyph per letter and happily drawn left to right. for typing of course we
have a new world of hurt. all of east-asia is happy left-to-right. western
europe, north and south america, northern asia, eastern europe, and a large
chunk of africa. in india roman text is pretty popular as is english (remember
these are generalisations you can find exceptions). i am making broad
generalisations - but as such, they are fairly true. :)

as such EFL has no right-to-left support - why? no one has yet to step up and
help. why? there is so little demand for it :( even the guys i know who do EFL
dev that speak/read arabic prefer using english (they are from lebanon). i know
it sounds harsh - i don't mean to be, but minority languages tend to get the
worse end of the stick support-wise :( i know how painful it can be supporting
them - i looked into doing right-to-left and gave up when i saw the world of
hurt that was doing mixes right-to-left and left-to-right formatting...
(english quoted inside arabic text, or vice-versa). one day i should make use
of pango for some of this - but at the time i wrote my font engine pango was
new and fairly sluggish. one day there will be enough impetus for someone to do
something about it, but until now - that hasn't existed. :(

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