Re: 3.1.12 and some questions.

[Ulric Eriksson <ulric@siag.nu>]

On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Alexey Kakunin wrote:

> Hi!
> I have downloaded 3.1.12. Very good work!
> I like Pathetic Writer very much.
> Now, I have some questions:
> 1) How to translate interface into the other language (Russian for
> Example) ?
> 2) I am russian and I use PW for editing some russians documents. We use
> koi8-r codepage. All works good, except then I use styles (for Example
> heading). For paragraphs, which use some styles PW uses non koi8-r
> codepage in the printing. Where can I change styles settings for using
> my codepage, or where can I set codepage for all document.
> 3) Then I use spell-checker, I should run "ispell -russian" for russian
> documents checking. Where can I change command, which used for
> spell-checking?

To summarize these three questions: there are *many* places where
Latin1 is assumed. The fonts in fonts.scm are treated as Latin1 or "don't
care" using a hack, and for those it thinks are Latin1 this is hard-coded
in the PostScript output. The PS generation code is in xcommon/fonts.c and
in fileio_ps.c in the various programs.

The spell checker is run from cmds.c. You'll need to add the new options
in the C code. If all you need is a different dictionary (like I do, who
come from Sweden), you can set the environment variable DICTIONARY. But I
suspect that ispell needs more than that to handle Russian.

Adding support for Russian, or Hebrew for that matter, is something I
would like to do but I just don't have the know-how.

> 4) As I understand xfiler based on xfm? If it right, can you return
> application window, and is xfiler configuration compatible with xfm
> configuration? I use xfm 1.4.2 as my primary file manager and I think
> about switching into the xfiler, but I will very glad to simple copy all
> my configurations from ~/.xfm

Xfiler is based on Files by Andre Hentz, which is in turn based on Xfm. I
have been using Files since 1996 or so, and adopted the code because it
hasn't been updated in a very long time.

I *think* the three should be largely configuration compatible, although I
don't know enough about the details particularly regarding Xfm. Files does
not have a separate application window and neither does Xfiler.

> 5) I see code and found, what you use catdoc for reading WinWord
> documents. May be it will better to use mswordview for converting doc
> file into the temporary html file and then, convert this html file into
> the pw file. MSWordView converts doc very well, PW reads html very well
> too, so the converting from doc to pw through mswordview should works
> well.

MSWordView only handles Word 8, but I agree that it does a better job of
it than catdoc.

I think PW needs a convenient way to add external converters without
having to write C wrappers. For each converter, one would have to specify:

 - the "name" of the format, i.e. "MS Word 8" or "Rich Text Format"
 - a filename pattern, i.e. "*.doc" or "*.rtf"
 - the path to the converter
 - what it converts to (html, text, rtf...)

Ulric