>If these "enabling technologies" are part of huge C++ libraries which add
considerable overhead to an application or if they involve too
many arcane, poorly documented and difficult to debug API calls many developers
will choose not to use them (and ignore support for many of the scripts in
Unicode) when writing things like text editors, email clients, database front
ends, and so on.
Well, on Mac OS 8.6 (.5?) and later, text can be rendered using ATSUI
interfaces, which are the standard interfaces that all app developers are being
encouraged to write to. I don't have first hand knowledge of them, but my
impression is that they are anything but arcane, poorly documented and difficult
to debug. What is more, the app developer who uses these interfaces to create a
Latin script-capable text editor (for example) automatically gets support for
*any* writing system for which resources are defined on the given system,
*without the app having to know anything about it*. No huge libraries need to be
added to the application - it's all part of the OS. Adding support for complex
scripts couldn't be easier! This is the kind of thing that's going to make
Unicode truly realise its potential.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT