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   GOLDED      GoldED Public Release discussion.      2,690 messages   

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   Message 536 of 2,690   
   andrew clarke to Nicholas Boel   
   The NAB twisted take on P4   
   06 Jun 15 21:15:34   
   
   Hello Nicholas!   
      
   04 Jun 15 16:53, you wrote to mark lewis:   
      
    NB> So you're saying you're using the INTERNAL Golded+ editor? If so, it's   
    NB> no wonder nothing is working for you. You have to use a real UTF-8   
    NB> compatible external editor (like nano or vi) to write in UTF-8.   
    NB> Golded+ doesn't support UTF-8 whatsoever as far as I can tell.   
      
   It supports writing UTF-8 messages, provided a UTF-8 capable external editor   
   is used, as you say, but that's about it.   
      
   Non-ASCII UTF-8 messages will always be garbled in GoldED (also Msged, timEd).   
   You can try rebuilding GoldED "make WIDE_NCURSES=1" but it only helps very   
   marginally. Part of the reason is because GoldED (and probably the other two)   
   is mostly using Curses' mvaddch() for displaying characters on the screen one   
   byte at a time, when UTF-8 expects multibyte encoding.   
      
   Another problem that springs to mind is C's strlen() can return > 1 for a   
   single character on the screen, which I imagine would mess up word wrapping at   
   the least.   
      
   It's not impossible to fix GoldED but I don't think it's practical, plus it   
   wouldn't help on Windows & OS/2, where Curses isn't used and UTF-8 console   
   subsystem support for textmode apps is either poor or non-existant. A GUI app   
   on those two platforms is really the only way you can get good UTF-8 output   
   AFAIK.   
      
   In a lot of ways GoldED etc is overkill these days. I think the way forward is   
   to write a simple line oriented reader (similar to /usr/bin/mail) that's UTF-8   
   clean from the start, then build on top of that if you want a CUI or GUI.   
      
   --- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20130910   
    * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)   

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