Antialiased Nedit, UTF8 now a possibility

[Thomas Orgis]

Am Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:10:25 +0200
schrieb Dušan Peterc <dusan.peterc at gmail.com>: 

> I hope this will raise the interest of somebody willing to do the remaining
> 10% (or is it 50% ?).
> The text in the main window is not antialiased, and the text in the help
> window.

Problem is that the text widget is rather at the core of a text editor...
10% is definitely not enough.

> Actually, some UTF8 <-> isoXXXX encoding is probably necessary in such an
> editor, just like kwrite has it.

The conversion itself is not the big isssue when you have iconv() available...

> handled now, where UTF8 would be the inner display mode, and various input

That's the core point: You need to work UTF (or, rather wide characters of
16 or 32 bit) into nedit, with all the funny unicode aspects like greatly
enlarged character classes. Nedit does not just need to display the text,
it needs to work it.

> I think that nedit would remain a popular editor for the next 15 years, if
> only it had support for for antialiased fonts and UTF8.

I agree to Unicode support, but I rather prefer a clean fixed width bitmap
font for program text (like the misc-fixed unicode font I use in my terminal).
I see anti-aliasing being more important when you deal with layout that has
more to do with typesetting ... like, I cannot bear looking at PDF text
documents without anti-aliasing on a computer screen.

> Many users and/or programmers suggested dropping Motif in favor of a more
> modern toolkit.
> Many times Motif was blamed for not providing this or that. Now Motif  AA
> fonts and UTF8 it, but nedit is unable to use it. Isn't that sad?

The toolkit support is one prerequesite, but not nearly all the work...

> I know there will be many users who will say that their old platform does
> not support OpenMotif.

Actually, I dropped OpenMotif because my platform is too _new_! OpenMotif wants
the Xprint library, which is not included anymore with current Xorg versions.
It's a showstopper for now... and then, there's the other point that prevented me
from doing much work for making it work again:
OpenMotif is not free software. See

http://www.marutan.net/cde/

> I think that with OpenSolaris, even SUN users can use OpenMotif, as kernel
> is open source.

Well, we also have "proper" Motif on our Sun systems at work... but then, that's
Solaris, not OpenSolaris;-)

> My knowledge of inner working of Motif is minimal, I am only an application
> developer.

That is where nedit needs work: Inside the application (editor core and text widget).
So if you want to step in, I can imagine people welcoming this;-)


Alrighty then,

Thomas.
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