[Tux4kids-discuss] [Tuxmath-devel] Further clarifications about maintainance

[LM]

scottmc wrote:
>We now the Tux4Kids github site up and running and have cloned most of the
> repositories over to it.  We have now started adding more team members.  If
> you are interested in being a team member or stepping up to be a maintainer
> for any of programs, let us know.  Once we have the maintainers in place we
> should be better able to handle Pull Requests and new issue reports.

> We have a few of the students who applied to work with Tux4Kids for Google
> Summer of Code express interest in working on their proposed projects
> outside of GSoC.  We have asked them to join the tux4kids-discuss mailing
> list and to ask questions here if they needed any help.

I'm not a student, but I am looking at adding SDL2 support to
t4k_common, tuxmath and tuxtype.

At the moment, I'm trying to figure out the best way to keep
internationalization support
working properly with SDL2 (or to improve it).  I found out some
interesting things
regarding this.  I'm using SDL_ttf/SDL2_ttf in my builds instead of
Cairo.  SDL_ttf and
SDL2_ttf only support the UCS-2 character set, not the entire UTF-32
character set.  Would
think the UTF-8 functions would handle the entire UTF-8/UTF-32
character set, but they only
handle 2 bytes.  Some programs (such as sdl_unifontview) use a
modified version of SDL_ttf
so anything above 2 bytes isn't cut off.  I'm experimenting with some
of those modifications
now.

The way tuxmath and tuxtype are currently written, if one builds with
SDL_ttf/SDL2_ttf
instead of Cairo, internationalization support is limited to 2 bytes
(UCS-2 character set).
If it's built on Windows, wchar_t is 2 bytes, so even if it's built with Cairo,
internationalization support is limited to 2 bytes.  Also, thought it
was strange that
t4k_tts.c uses espeak_Synth with espeakCHARS_AUTO but it's passing the
variable text
using tts_argument and text is wchar_t.  According to the espeak documentation,
espeakCHARS_AUTO is "8 bit or UTF8".

Would be curious to know how many people are actually using the
internationalization
features and if anyone's willing to test them if modifications are
made.  Thanks.