Chapter 7. Output to Display

67

Some people (ISO 8859 1 language speakers) may think that

XFontSet

 related functions are not

8 bit clean. This is wrong.

XFontSet

 related functions work according to

LC_CTYPE

locale. The

default LC_CTYPE locale uses ASCII. Thus, if a user doesn't set

LANG

,

LC_CTYPE

, nor

LC_ALL

environmental variable,

XFontSet

 related functions will use ASCII, i.e., not 8 bit clean. The user

has to set

LANG

,

LC_CTYPE

, or

LC_ALL

environmental variable properly (for example,

LANG=en_US

).

The upstream developers of X clients sometimes hate to enforce users to set such environmental

variables.

4

In such a case, The X clients should have two ways to output text, i.e.,

XFontStruct

related conventional way and

XFontSet

 related internationalized way. If

setlocale()

returns

NULL

,

 C 

, or

 POSIX 

, use

XFontStruct

way. Otherwise use

XFontSet

way. The author

implemented this algorithm to a few window managers such as TWM (version 4.0.1d), Blackbox

(0.60.1), IceWM (1.0.0), sawmill (0.28), and so on.

Window managers need more modifications related to inter clients communication. This topic

will be described later.

7.2.2 Athena widgets

Athena widget is already internationalized.

***** Not written yet *****

7.2.3 Gtk and Gnome

Gtk is already internationalized.

***** Not written yet *****

7.2.4 Qt and KDE

Though internationalized version of Qt was available for a long time, it could not be the official

version of Qt. The license of Qt of those days inhibited to distribute internationalized version of

Qt. However, Troll Tech at last changed their mind and Qt's license and now the official version

of Qt is internationalized.

***** Not written yet *****

4

IMHO, all users will have to set LANG properly when UTF 8 will become popular.