World: r3wp

this is the exact discussion I was having with Anton a few weeks 
ago... although we can sometimes get to such stuff..  its a pain, 
and in some cases, its not even possible for some events... and then 
one has to wonder how to get to them on platforms they know nothing 
about.

I really do hope a better  HAL API for handling more events is devised 
for R3.

and Gregg, key ups are as usefull for low-level implementations of 
UIs as mouse ups.  Wonder why there are so few VIEW games?

REBOL promises so much, then feels deceptively shallow at times. 
 That doesn't meen I give up... it just means I'm relatively alone 
in my club.  :-(

This is where I distinguish between REBOL the language, and the things 
built on top of it, like View. REBOL is great, but some of the supporting 
pieces need to be improved.

I gotta tell you. Implementing an IME and showing Chinese characters 
on REBOL/View are perplexing and painful, especially I am doing this 
all by myself. Even worse, considering I have so many works to do 
in my office, I don't really have much time to do this for REBOL/View. 
But I want it so bad, what options do I have? Waiting for REBOL 3.0 
or 3.1? Well, I look forward to it, but I don't count on it. Only 
God knows when it's going to be released. 


As a "Messaging Language" for communication between people and people, 
computers and people, computers and computers, REBOL should have 
supported I18N many years ago.

We know.

How is it going so far Jerry?

Got anything to show?

Have you seen that french application that teaches Chinese characters 
?

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)...