Hi everybody,
Doesn't the argument of display of fonts seem to be fading with the major work load having shifted to xft in X ??
All the same it makes me wonder why chinese is first supported as international language these days by any software. Devnagri doesn't figure anywhere most of the times. Despite the fact that mandarin script is quite difficult in structure than the devnagri. Some developer of X back then pointed out that it was due to lack of standard in implementation of fonts. There are n things to making fonts and there is a lack of standards for that in indian fonts was the gist.
And now talking of GTK vs Qt (again why should it be vs is something that beats me !) i always look at the memory usage and relevance of features. I dunno who made that comment -> "KDE values quality over features" ... but thats actually a characteristic of gtk and not kde/Qt. They actually try to get things neat, secure, clean than kde where the user is first confronted with soo many features to tweak that he/she wishes their original platform were better. Talking of quality i consider memory usage to be one aspect of it too. GTK simply shines there. KDE/Qt has tons of work to do in that section. GTK as it stands now is no way perfect but a viable and an extremely efficient platform for anyone who hates visual clutter (read as eye candy). I haven't tested the upcoming 2.4 gnome but as far as the aims goes they have a surefire winner.
There are many points which could be debated as to where GTK shines and where it does not. But as far as application development goes gtk is a preferred choice by most of the apps in linux for gui.
i couldn't help popping in when someone simply fires off against gnome or kde without giving it a thought. ;)
my next post was supposed to be on my experiences wit h the various filesystems in linux. oh well nevermind. it'll be the next.
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On Tuesday 03 Jun 2003 5:25 pm, linuxdev wrote:
Hi everybody,
Doesn't the argument of display of fonts seem to be fading with the major work load having shifted to xft in X ??
Supporting Hindi is not just about fonts. For example, while in a textedit/lineedit wizard, you need to delete multiple bytes of data when user pressed backspace in case of Indic languages.. similarly while selecting, you would want to select the whole glyph, which includes the "vyanjan" as well as "matra". Now these are the types of things what are being implemented in QT/pango. The recent developments seems to bring us in a position where we can say Indic is finally supported in Linux [XFT was not enough] As an illustration: you get [http://www.me.iitb.ac.in/~upadhyay/konq-hindi.png] when you have support for font, but lack the logic of special intricacies of Indic scripts, for example "choti ee" though comes after a consonant, should be displayed before it.
In the same way, whatever you do in XFT, is not going to be appropriate to support Indic in console. Which will require kernel level tinkering [some one has already done it, but haven't ported it to newer kernels, AFAIK]. All in all, its a bigger issue than that can be handled by mere xft.
All the same it makes me wonder why chinese is first supported as international language these days by any software. Devnagri doesn't figure
May be coz they know kungfu better than us ;) [my guess is Chinese language is not as complicated as Indic ones from rendering/input point of view]
anywhere most of the times. Despite the fact that mandarin script is quite difficult in structure than the devnagri. Some developer of X back then pointed out that it was due to lack of standard in implementation of fonts.
Open Type supports Indic pretty well [given all those I talked about in the first para are taken care off, which luckily is the case now]
And now talking of GTK vs Qt (again why should it be vs is something that beats me !) i always look at the memory usage and relevance of features. I dunno who made that comment -> "KDE values quality over features" ... but thats actually a characteristic of gtk and not kde/Qt. They actually try to
I did and with screen shots etc gave reason why i believed that. You tell me why do you think contrary? KDE has good quality, tons of features.
get things neat, secure, clean than kde where the user is first confronted with soo many features to tweak that he/she wishes their original platform
I don't think stock KDE requires more configuration then for Gnome [Taking Mandrake 9.1/9.0 as reference] Since the installation, it has asked me my name, email address, pop3 server, nntp server, proxy setting, dict server, gpg key and thats about it. Similar have been my experience with Gnome. I guess what you are talking about is bad distribution, not a KDE fault. Another thing you have to remember, that there is much more going on in KDE than in Gnome, which invariably means more "things" to bother the user ;)
were better. Talking of quality i consider memory usage to be one aspect of it too. GTK simply shines there. KDE/Qt has tons of work to do in that section.
Umm... startup time would have been a better example. First I don't have benchmarks to support verify you views, compare kde 3.1 with gnome 2.2 and please mail me if you know of some such results [I have absolutely no interest of installing Gnome, any further than that is required to run gaim in near future].
GTK as it stands now is no way perfect but a viable and an extremely efficient platform for anyone who hates visual clutter (read as eye candy). I haven't tested the upcoming 2.4 gnome but as far as the aims goes they have a surefire winner.
Subjective.
"Visual clutter" and "Efficient platform" lies in the realms of troll.
There are many points which could be debated as to where GTK shines and where it does not. But as far as application development goes gtk is a preferred choice by most of the apps in linux for gui.
Its just a legacy or reminder of those days when people knew QT is a better toolkit [this is at-least out of debate, its much better than MFC or any other CPP library], but avoided it for license issues. "writing GPL program, wow, use GNU toolkit". Thats it, it never was on merit [Personal opinion]
On Tuesday 03 Jun 2003 6:01 pm, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe wrote:
On Tue, Jun 03, 2003 at 01:27:54PM +0530, Amit Upadhyay wrote:
Umm.. In my local group it is sort of KDE is the desktop, we dont use gnome. How about this list? I have lots of reasons to prefer KDE, first of which is excellant library QT. Nothing beats its simplicity and cleanness of API interface, excellant documentation and responsive mailing list. Gnome is just a hack on what was a small toolkit for GIMP.
Why do you say that? Have you worked with GNOME? Or any of the related libraries like GTK, libglade, etc? How many languages does KDE support for developing applications?
Coz I have seen that. Yes, even thought it was cleaner than KDE, but then thats all it was, konqueror, konsole, juk, korganizer, kmail, kab, knode, kdevelop, kdict etc occurred to me as better than Gnome counterparts. Not for programming. [ref: http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/] Python, Perl, Java, JS, C#, Smoke, Ruby. Respectively.
I for one, love the smooth and simple GNOME desktop ... the best part is the decoupling of the desktop environment from the window manager
:-s
... customizing the behaviour of my desktop like keyboard shortcuts, workspace management is such a breeze!
These [workspace management] are increasingly falling in the realms of distribution more than KDE/Gnome. Incidentally shortcut/toolbar customization in KDE is far superion than Gnome currently.
- -- Amit Upadhyay Senior Undergraduate Student Department of Mechanical Engg. Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Mumbai-76, India Phone: (91) 9820325940
On Tuesday 03 June 2003 19:55, Amit Upadhyay wrote:
All the same it makes me wonder why chinese is first supported as international language these days by any software. Devnagri doesn't figure
May be coz they know kungfu better than us ;) [my guess is Chinese language is not as complicated as Indic ones from rendering/input point of view]
It is a lot more complicated.
anywhere most of the times. Despite the fact that mandarin script is quite difficult in structure than the devnagri. Some developer of X back then pointed out that it was due to lack of standard in implementation of fonts.
Only partly true. The real reason is market size all of the 1.2 billion of em (well almost all) read and write the same.
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Amit Upadhyay -
J. T. D'souza -
linuxdev