Older blog entries for mathrick (starting at number 83)

Yep. It’s not my accomplishment, mind you, I was too lazy and just got used to the shortcomings. So the new version of ccharset comes courtesy of teh_LaC. Here you can get it. Readme stays the same as in the old version, but bear in mind the config file is no longer compatible, so you’ll have to set channel encodings again.

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And there are sure signs:

This is a Japanese paragraph, laid oud according to Japanese traditional typography rules, ie. running vertically, from top to bottom and with lines stacked from right to left. Notice the highlighted text. Red is Latin script, which normally doesn’t run vertical, therefore it’s rotated to retain shape in a foreign environment. The blue part is digits, which are considered script-neutral, therefore they get laid out according to the direction currently in effect.

And here’s how it’s done:

What doesn’t work perfectly yet is alternate embedding modes (as there’s more than one way imaginable to try and fit horizontal text in a vertical paragraph). Need to debug it.

Update:
So, I fixed the bug mentioned previously, as I expected, it was because of errors in my copypasted option parsing code in the test viewer. Now I can try out all modes, and for those of you who expected the post-apocalyptic world to be dwelled by strange and bizzare creatures, you were right. Check out this curiosity:

This is a result of laying out a random snippets of text (taken from Wikipedia and Qatar’s MoFA site, respectively), to test multiscript layout, rendered in EMBED_LINE mode. This mode will layout paragraphs, trying to agree all foreign scripts with the primary direction glyphs run in. And as you can no doubt see, they have been agreed indeed. Except that to get LTR English and RTL Arabic running in the same direction, you need to have their “up”’s pointing in the opposite direction. Which is kind of odd and strange and confusing. But well, you can’t have a horizontal script laid out in vertical paragraph without breaching at least some of its properties.

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I’ve been here in PL for a couple of days already, so here are two general observations about Spain:

• My God, it’s HOT over there
• Salads you can get over there are surprisingly crappy and/or totally incompatible with my expectations of what a good salad is. It’s not impossible that you’re supposed to add olive and vinegar yourself, but then, how is it different from a DIY kit? And how am I supposed to do that with a full plate, anyway?

Other than that, GUADEC was a total rockage, and organisers did an awesome job. As you can read in this report (I hope you can, because I can’t ;), which’s got a paragraph about me and a pic (fame, yay!), for me the best thing was finally seeing the faces of people I have know for something like 3 years online.

Other things:

The screenshot below is a testament of my complete pwnage over Gnome Robots. The next thing, I pressed Enter and they all rushed over to crash and burn under my feet. Hah!

My CRT is broken and makes my eyes bleed if I stare at it for extended periods of time. Coding is hard this way and I need to get a new one, but noone has displays I could try out, so I’m left to choose based on whatever they write in glossy specs and hope for the best when I actually order them.

I just increased Bonfire’s bugcount 5.5-fold. It’s not often you do that (and surely the fact there were 2 bugs total filed for this youngest product in bugzilla doesn’t matter at all), and in recognition of my virtues, I gained a bugzilla point! Woo-hoo!

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So, yesterday my foot’s got swollen, and today it’s really blown up and hurts a lot when I try to walk on it. As I don’t remember breaking it (and frankly, I don’t believe in myself enough to claim I’d be able to even attempt walking on a broken foot), it’s probably a bite. Nasty stuff, doesn’t want to come off, but fortunately someone’s had it the same thing before, so I’ll be getting some bandages and medicine in the evening. I surely do hope it goes off tomorrow, otherwise I’ll have to see a doctor, not to mention I’ve got the plane tomorrow, with sleep-over at the airport, which doesn’t exactly sound like a fun thing to do in my current condition.

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So, I just realised the stuff I’m fighting with right now is screenshotable, so here you go:

The legend goes like this:

• the text is, well, text; it’s supposed to be stacked this way (and to get an actual vertical layout, you just rotate the cairo drawable).
• Colourful Boxes are bounding boxes, you can see how it sort of does a wrong idea of where the glyphs lie. This is because the rotation done on glyphs, and their origin point is in a corner, instead of the centre.

I’m currently trying to compensate for this, but that’s actually not easy, as PangoGlyphGeometry holds the width, but not height. So fixing horizontal shift is easy, vertical is not. Especially because there’s this bug where a valid (because it’s used one line below with no problems) pointer to PangoFont can’t be cast to GObject.

Update: So, yeah, taking an address of a pointer doesn’t always yield the desired results. But it still doesn’t really work, and Behdad is out to Barcelona, *grumble*.

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This is being written on the new version of nokia 770. Cool.

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Stuff that made me laugh today:

<code>
/* The PangoContext and PangoContextClass structs are private; if you
* need to create a subclass of these, mail otaylor@redhat.com
*/
</code><code></code>

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Been to København yester-yesterday, it’s cool, full of interesting places, big and noisy, and I prefer my Smallville to live in :). And it’s cool when you can usefully communicate in Danish, and I’ve been able to do that more and more over the past months.

developerWorks published another piece, this time about i18n in GTK+ context. Never before was so much of tricky knowledge (attempted to be) stuffed into so few words, let’s hope it manges to give people the right idea where to begin.

Also, preparing for the trip to GUADEC, and by implication, me leaving DK for 2 months, not to mention trying to catch up with my SoC that’s been lagging way too much. Fun.

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Here’s another small xchat hack I wrote to add missing functionality: privflash. It makes private messages behave the same as nick highlight you get in channels, ie., blue highlight + taskbar flash. Why it isn’t like that in default xchat I dunno, but finally I got annoyed enough to fix it. One day I’ll also add some sane nick availability notification, current “notify: <nick> is online” is completely laughable, but that’s later.

PS. The usual drill to install it: needs python plugin, drop it into ~/.xchat2/, it’ll get picked up next time you start xchat, or /py load privflash.py if you don’t want to wait. Enjoy.

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Wow, a post. A rare sight indeed. Anyway, I got accepted into this years SoC, with the project on making Pango support vertical writing. Coolness! There’s also some movement towards getting us (the students) to GUADEC, even though the registration process is formally over. Coolness too, especially if it works out.

Some other pimping I didn’t get around to before: My writing for IBM developerWorks went nicely, and in addition to the previously contracted series, I got to write 3 more articles. One of them is already up, this time our fine bindings guys get some love and fame. You might have noticed it’s published in “AIX and Unix” section this time, that was a kind of sekret projekt they got going on, which basically increased demand for new stuff, and by extension my opportunites to write something. I must say that writing on stuff you know and love is a joy, the only thing that sucks (besides my perennial ability to stick to schedules, sigh) is the hopelessly low word limit, I hate it with passion.

Ah, and since it’s apparently going to get syndicated by p.g.o, it’s a good place to ask: If you are in the GNOME Village and have some free places and are willing to host me, drop me a line. I need that to apply for sponsorship and to, well, have some place to crash at GUADEC :). I can be reached by the comments form or email, mathrick at gmail.com. Unfortunately my ISP is braindamaged and blocks outgoing mail, so mathrick.org is currently out of reach :(.

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