Re: gEDA-user: PCB: simple FreeType fonts implementation -- update?

[Colin D Bennett <colin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 13 May 2011 17:52:38 +0100
Peter TB Brett <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Friday 13 May 2011 17:34:21 Colin D Bennett wrote:
> 
> > > Note that it's been mentioned that PCB's internal "text"
> > > representation should switch from ASCII-7 to UTF-8, and I agree.
> >
> > That should be quite simple and painless, right?  Fully
> > backward-compatible.
> 
> *cringe*
> 
> Those sound like famous last words to me.

Absolutely true. :-)  I have regretted them more than once.

> There at least four things that make converting to UTF-8 often
> nightmarish:
> 
> 1) Code that assumes that strlen returns the number of characters in
> a string. 2) Code that iterates through characters in a string.
> 3) Trying to treat filenames as UTF-8 (sometimes they are. Sometimes
> they're not).
> 4) Multiple Unicode codepoints for the same actual character.

Agreed, these are some concerns that would have to be worked out.
Perhaps it would be easier and better to use UTF-32 for internal
operations, to simplify random access to characters in strings, and
just use UTF-8 for external storage (i.e., disk files).

Anyway, Unicode support isn't my #1 priority anyway.  There are plenty
of other features I desire more urgently.

Regards,
Colin


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