Lars Gullik Bjønnes wrote:
>
> Think *unicode* and forget about this one for now.
>
I'm not a developper but I'm wondering if you are not underestimating the
complexity of going Unicode. Changing the internal format to Unicode is
maybe not that hard but having a fully Unicode editor is *very* complex. It
took 3 years to another Norwegian Lars from Trolltech to code Scribe and I
doubt that Pango the Gtk counterpart has took less time. If you leave
European languages, you are going in a sea of misery. Think languages with
ligatures like Arabic where if you select part of a word you must change
the shape of the letter in your clipboard and that is just the beginning.
Leave the Middle East to Asia and the complexity is multiplied.
Before going Unicode it would be an interesting experiment to see if it is
not possible to wrap the Lyx editor around Scribe and/or Pango.
Why also an XML format is so important for LyX ? XML is slow to parse and
hungry in memory. KOffice (using the OpenOffice XML file) is wery bad with
big files. Is XML really adapted for wordprocessing ? What is really
problematic with the actual format ?
I'm more interested in development going towards :
- A change of the interface to move away of the MsWord 95 paradigm which is
showing its limits
- Extensibility. Make it easy to add a Gui for LaTeX package foo. For
example, when I choose French for my document, I would like to have a
'nombre' formatting option appear in my menu to format numbers the French
way and not be obliged to enter \nombre{1000} in ERT.
Cheers,
Charles
--
http://www.kde-france.org
