[cairo] non-ascii output

[Evan Martin]

On 5/17/05, Bill Spitzak <spitzak at d2.com> wrote:
> It does seem the Cairo authors are seriously underestimating how
> important the "toy" (as they call it) utf-8 interface is. It is vital
> that we be able to draw arbitrary strings as UTF-8 and see something
> that approaches what you can get *today* on OS/X and Windows.

Doing this fully is Hard, and that's why there are libraries like
Pango and m17n-lib.

However, it *does* seem reasonable (and this goes back to my original
mail) to at least make the interface put out *something* for non-ASCII
text.  As it stands, you might as well rename cairo_show_text() to
cairo_show_ascii().

Would someone at least acknowledge my plight?  A "this is a bug" or
"this is intended behavior" would be sufficient.  :)


[snip]
> Similarily I recommend that all errors be drawn as though the error
> bytes are in ISO-8859-1 or even the Microsoft CP1252 character sets.
> This will allow virtually all 8-bit text to be drawn unchanged and thus
> remove the need to preserve an ASCII data path and duplicate interfaces
> through the software. Without this programs are forced to convert ASCII
> data to UTF-8 and again they lose the incentive to convert to UTF-8
> only. I know this runs into extreme resistance because it is considered
> US/Euro-centric and thus politically incorrect, but I still want to try
> to fight for this.

While I agree with some of your other points, this is just completely
wrong, and it's already been discussed to death.

Additionally, you're using ASCII and CP1252 interchangably here, which
muddles your point; an API that accepts UTF-8 already accepts ASCII,
so there's no need to "convert ASCII data to UTF-8".

I don't know what "preserve an ASCII data path" means, either.