Re: GtkAda for professional GUI-Application ?

[David Marceau <davidmarceau@sympatico.ca>]

Jeffrey Creem wrote:
> 
> "Adrian Knoth" <adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de> wrote in message
> news:slrnb301sv.4ms.adi@drcomp.erfurt.thur.de...
> > Frank Piron <frank.piron@konad.de> wrote:
> > > Unfortunately GtkAda 1.3.12 ( Windows ) cannot handle
> > > German - Umlaute.
> >
> > Yes, because Gtk 1.3.x does not support UTF8.
Yes UTF8 seems popular.  Many Japanese web sites use shift-jis(utf-8). 
What I find surprising is that I still have to tell my web browser which
encoding I should use for a certain web page. i.e. either french/english
or japanese(shift, euc, iso...).  I thought that was all taken care of a
long-time ago.

> >
> > You'll need to switch to GTK 2.2 instead, but as far as I know there
> > is no working windows-port, yet.
> 
If you find it acceptable using win32/IME and X11 directly side-by-side
with GTK 
you might want to consider looking at Yudit sources for inspiration.
Yudit seems to support German Umlaute and runs on windows.
http://www.yudit.org/download/binary/

For programmer editors IMHO emacs/MULE is hard to beat however when
dealing with non-english american characters, 
I find important that whatever gui programmer/text editor used should
clearly indicated status of the following:
-what file format is my source code saved in(utf-8, as opposed to utf-7
or iso-8859-1 etc...)
-what keyboard input mode am I typing in
-what key encoding is the file being displayed in
Yudit IMHO provides that.
It comforts me to know that I have one editor I do mostly everything
in(EMACS) but sometimes I just want to double-check that I saved my
emacs stuff in the right format(MULE stuff).  Yudit provides this for
me.  In Emacs I tend to forget what display mode, what key-input, what
file-format I'm in and IMHO they are not clearly indicated.

From what I understand, not only does yudit support japanese and
hungarian but the hungarian mode supports German characters.  The
following taken from the Yudit docs:
"
Hungarian
  It maps Hungarian and German characters. The  accented characters 
  can be input with the  English character followed by the accent.
    Examples:
      a' becomes á , o: becomes ö ,  o" becomes �? 
      SS produces the German �Y , Ss  gives the paragraph sign §.
"

Alternative 1)
Yudit depends on libc, libX11/win32IME and the dynamic linker and not on
gtk.  Maybe the tricks used in the Yudit Source Code could be used while
co-existing with GTK < 2.2.  It does defeat the reason for using GTK in
the first place though since you wanted to avoid using different apis on
different platforms.  At least it is an alternative to see your stuff
working with what you have i.e gtk < 2.2 instead of installing a new gtk
along with other dependencies it may have on both linux and windows.

Alternative 2)
They said about X-Window, "build the software and the hardware will
come".  Now I suggest build your software in linux/gtk2.2 and the
windows gtk2.2 will come :)  

Alternative 3)
Ditch windows altogether and start using linux boxes everywhere.  

Alternative 4)
Ditch GTK and consider using commercial software.

Alternative 5)look for other alternatives

Notice how I am going to CYA myself and not suggest which alternative to
go with.  That's up to you :)  Good luck :)

Cheers,
David Marceau