Re: How to change font encoding?

James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> But, as I understand it now, when you use Tahoma and the Thai keyboard 
> layout that instead of Tahi, you get Roman characters.  If you have the 
> Tahi i18n package installed, it shouldn't do that.  That qualifys as a 
> BUG.  As I understand it, it was now supposed to do that automatically, 
> that you don't need to select the encoding, selecting the keyboard 
> should do it just like it does with Spanish or German.

No, I can type Thai when I switch to Thai keyboard.  (Assuming I've set 
the Tahoma font, or some font with Thai glyphs).

What I can't do is see a Thai filename or Thai text files, even one I 
just wrote in Thai.  Please see my responses to Akar about this.

> I'm sorry that I didn't understand that switching the keyboard layout 
> was how you had changed it.  As I said, I know that that works for 
> Spanish and German.  So, it should work the same for any language that 
> has 256 characters or less.  What is different about 3.x is that you 
> don't/shouldn't need to set the character encoding for it to work since 
> with Qt 3.x this is now automatic.

I have come to the understanding at this point that there isn't really a 
bug, there is just a problem of the developers thinking they could make 
a program smart, and didn't realize that this would impede the user from 
doing something that is completely logical once you realize that someone 
would want to do it, but you might not have imagined that it would 
affect anyone when you decided to make the software smart.

I would have hoped that we had learned enough from Windows about what 
happens with smart software.

But anyway, as I see it now:

Selecting the Thai keyboard causes KDE/Qt3 to use the Thai encoding (I 
suppose it is using unicode internally, which is Ok, since our favorite 
font Tahoma works with that).  So I can type Thai fine in KDE dialogs 
and applications.

But a filename or a text file written in Thai, only displays as 
?????????? because Qt has no way of knowing which character set to use 
for 8-bit text, or the 8-bit characters of a filename.  Thus it displays 
???????????.  This problem was neatly avoided in KDE 2 by simply setting 
the encoding for the font.  If we chose iso8859-11 then Thai characters 
would appear for the upper group of 8-bit text data.  Choosing another 
encoding would display another character set.

There must be some way to tell KDE what character set to use to display 
8-bit text correctly.  For media like email and HTML, this is no problem 
as there are special headers or fields that can specify the character 
set.  But for a plain text file and for filenames in the filesystem, 
there must be a way for the user to control the encoding selection.

Even still there are times when one wants to override the character set 
choices made in a web browser or email client, and tell the application 
to use an encoding selected by the user.  Basically, reducing the amount 
of manual choices available to a user is *always* a bad thing.  It seems 
like we are headed in that direction though.  If automagic features are 
being added to KDE, they should be included as a new choice in the 
manual choices list.  The auto can be made default.  But to take away 
the ability to manually override, is just un-Linux!

Good day, and thank you for your interest in my problem.


--
_____________________
Christopher R. Carlen
crobc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Suse 8.1 Linux 2.4.19

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