World: r3wp

It's not going any far (if I know where I am going), since I am stuck 
in IME. There are some decisions to make. I've just started to think 
that maybe the whole IME thing is a stupid idea. Every morning, I 
wake up and turn on the computer, hoping that the REBOL 3.0 alpha 
is out and end my misery. "Unicode support is not released today. 
Well, it could be tomorrow. Everything is gonna be different tomorrow." 
Since 5 years ago, I keep telling myself the same thing.

French application that teachs Chinese characters?

Yeah.

http://www.xuehanyu.org/this one?

Yes.

It's a view application ...

somewhere ...

Well, the Chinese Characters in that web site are images.

they have two interfaces ...

http://www.xuehanyu.org/sinoglyph.html

It's simplified Chinese used in China, not in Hongkong and Taiwan. 
This is a good site though.

It's too bad I cannot read French.

Looks like they removed the source code link.

Well, that's ok. Thank you Graham. BTW, are you Chinese? You have 
a Chinese last name.

Yes.

No wonder  : )

Jerry, I understand your pain, and I'll try to push I18N support 
for R3 as much as possible (that will probably need community help 
on the open source parts)

as an alternative for now, have you considered using an HTML interface 
instead of View? (ie. your app listens to port 80 and you point the 
browser to http://localhost/) It will be a pain too, but it's probably 
easier than trying to do IME from scratch. (OTOH it may depend on 
your needs.)

Gabriele, thank you. Actually I tried to use Flash 9 / ActionScript 
3.0 as the interface and REBOL as the engine. It worked. I _like_ 
ActionScript 3.0, but I _love_ REBOL even more. So, if there is still 
a change to do it in REBOL, I probabily will not give up. The REBOL 
language is too good to give up. Gabriele, please push I18N support. 
I'm willing to help.

Gabriele: I think that what we need is just to be able to display 
unicode characters in View. I don't think, it is such a problem. 
The rest is almost done or can be done by us.

but Carl probably know what we need and unicode is a big need.

And I have to say it again, the basic is to be able display the characters! 
I don't need to count lengths of unicode strings and other related 
actions, if so, I can do it by using my own functions.

And it would be nice to have possibility to manege embedded fonts, 
not just depend if someone has the font installed but be able to 
produce own fonts (which could be used)

oldes do you mean integrated support for TTF? that would be biiig 
imho.

there is support for ttf already, but you must have the font installed, 
why you cannot just give the path to font and use it?

as it's with the GD library in PHP

(but it depends on freetype, so it would be big:-)

anyway GD is using it's own font format (gdf), so why not to have 
rebol font format?

what is font anyway? it's just a small picture with information how 
big it is. I'm not sure if Flash 9 supports kerning, but in the older 
versions - font is just a array of shapes with widths mapped to unicode 
ids.

Oldes, I believe R3 will have support for embedded fonts. We might 
also add suport for embedding of bitmapped fonts(your favorite feature 
isn't it ;))

(font = I should say a font glyph)

yes, I like bitmapped fonts, I prefer pixel graphics:)

and bitmapped font can improve performance, as you don't ned to do 
all the resizing and antialiasing and other actions which must be 
done to display vector font

Actually there shouldn't be any performance difference as the vector 
glyphs are first rasterized into a font cache and then used.

just imaging the fun that you could add picture to any key code, 
so as you would type, you would display images instead of chars:-)

(unles you are not using the VECTORIAL mode in DRAW)

ok, I'm looking forward:-)

Hm I'm really not sure about embedded fonts in REBOL, specially in 
own format.

Why?

I'm not sure if it's really useful feature - requires some code, 
who's gonna draw fonts in some special format (or who's going to 
write some convertor)...

for bitmap fonts, this could be very nice.

just one last thought, it would be good to make it independent on 
X-win under linux - As you may want to be able do graphic operations 
on server which is not running x-win (most servers)

Actually you can do it even in current rebol. See the source of the 
quick-hack.r  demo. It has one vectorial font ebedded already.

Rebolek - I will do - And look at Flash - All flash apps are using 
embedded fonts, how can you ask if we need it in Rebol?

And if it can be done in REBOL already I definitely do not see why 
add that feature native. I think effort should be put in much more 
needed things.

Rebolek: My idea is to be able for example read installed ttf font 
and store it using some native function in DRAW format. Then you 
can embedded any font in your app.

I think having our own font format could bring more independency 
to REBOL. we would also be able to include fonts not necessarily 
present on the target machine

Cyphre: and you're going to write that parser? You really have so 
much time?

Currently fonts for linux and OSX is a mess.

The 'parser' is already there. Hod do you thing DRAW is getting the 
TTF fonts?