[developers] Partial success with unicode fonts

[Stephan Oepen]

hi berthold,

i am glad you are helping us to push international character support
(even) further.  the LUI issues are not surprising: yzlui has partial
UniCode support only (using original X11 primities), and pangolui is
using a state-of-the-art font engine for display but not for geometry
and layout decisions.  --- incidentally, a week or so ago we received
the pangolui sources from pavel (who, i believe, is no longer working
on it); i was planning to check with woodley (the original developer)
to see whether he had the time and interest to work on a merger.  but
that could take some time to play out, either way.

the issues you describe in non-LUI windows, i am pretty sure, are not
at the level of LKB code but inside the CLIM back-end.  i believe the
CLIM updates we saw in 2008 (in response to our earlier bug reports)
are exactly on aspects that fail to work for you: font selection for
a given encoding and UniCode plane.  i am actually optimistic it will 
be worth the effort filing a bug report with franz, and working with
their CLIM maintainer (andreas fuchs).  i think this should be filed
as a follow-up to earlier bug reports [spr30362] and [spr30570].  it
may be that andreas will ask for more details or test cases, but from
my experience in the past he has often been able to diagnose issues
remotely, based purely on observed behavior and knowledge about CLIM
internals.  it is definitely worth a shot.  and many of us are still
paying for CLIM as a product, so franz better continue to offer some
level of support :-).

could you prepare a bug report, based on your earlier emails, and copy
the original list of recipients on the earlier thread (which, i think,
included at least ann, francis, and me; at times also `developers')?

                                                 best wishes  -  oe

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++ Universitetet i Oslo (IFI); Boks 1080 Blindern; 0316 Oslo; (+47) 2284 0125
+++     CSLI Stanford; Ventura Hall; Stanford, CA 94305; (+1 650) 723 0515
+++       --- oe at ifi.uio.no; oe at csli.stanford.edu; stephan at oepen.net ---
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++