[sldev] Decoupling UI widget set from rest of viewer (Re: Qt for the viewer)

[Alissa Sabre]

> If anyone spends time evaluating or experimenting with either, be sure
> to look into i18n support. I believe it was Alissa, contributor of
> more than a dozen Asian language support viewer patches, who said that
> Asian language support was problematic under Qt.

Well, my understainding is that Qt is very poor in handling input
methods on Windows and MacOS.  I think Qt handles input methods well
on Linux.  I see no big problem in international text drawing on Qt's
standard widgets.  I don't remember that, but if I said Asian language
support was problematic under Qt, I meant input method handling was
problematic on Qt running on Windows or MacOS.

Note that _input_method_ is a generic name for mechanisms that allows
a users to use his/her standard keyboard to type characters more than
those labeled on the key tops.  In particular, some East Asian
languages including Japanese and Chinese require thousands of
characters, so it is essential to use a good input method to type
texts in those languages.

I believe Gtk is almost same case as Qt; it is poor handling input
methods on Windows and MacOS.  It's OK on Linux, and intermational
text drawing is OK on all three platforms.

I have no experience on wxWidgets, but a quick googling showed a lot
of complains on Japanese input features on wxWidgets, even on Linux.

> Last I remembered, Alissa Sabre had done some early work for using Gtk 
> for text input, out of frustration with the current UI's lack of support 
> for things that matter greatly for non-Latin character sets.

Yes, but it is for Linux only.  I believe that the current SL viewer's
input method handling on Windows and Linux is OK.  The reason the
current SL viewer on Linux lack good support for input methods is that
SDL is very poor in handling input methods.  So, I tried to adapt SL
viewer to Gtk based input handling, primarily suggested by Tofu
Linden.  (See VWR-2261 on Public JIRA.)

Well, I was very busy in my RL in June, and the Tofu's offer (as the
last comment to the above PJIRA issue) is currently pending.

I don't support, however, an idea to rewrite SL viewer to use Gtk
widget natively.  The work VWR-2261 does is use Gtk to create a big
main window, and run SL viewer in the window using current LLUI
framework.  It is in Linux specific code.  I had no intention to use
Gtk native widget to create SL viewer UI or to use Gtk on
Windows/MacOS.

    Alissa Sabre
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