Previous section.

Portable Layout Services: Context-dependent and Directional Text

Portable Layout Services:
Context-dependent and Directional Text
Copyright © 1997 The Open Group

Introduction

This chapter covers the scope of this document and introduces several important concepts. For definitions of unfamiliar terms, refer to the glossary.

Scope

This document describes a set of portable functions for handling context-dependent and bidirectional text transformations. It is a logical extension to the existing POSIX locale model.

Complex-Text Languages - An Overview provides a detailed overview of the writing system aspects of complex-text languages, including the bidirectional languages,1 Korean and Thai. If you are familiar with complex-text languages and the problems associated with their processing and presentation, you need not read Complex-Text Languages - An Overview .

This document introduces the concepts of complex-text languages and layout transformations. It defines a locale-associated object called LayoutObject to handle layout transformations. The layout object may contain an additional locale category, LO_LTYPE, containing character classifications and mappings for layout transformations.

This document also defines a standard set of layout values containing layout text descriptors and layout action indicators, and a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to facilitate layout transformations for complex-text languages.

This document addresses the need to enhance the existing XPG locale model. It provides support for the transformations between the layout of text during processing and the layout of text during presentation of complex-text languages, as an addition to the existing support for the basic locale services (parsing, tokenising, and so on).

Though the proposed concepts are not constrained to systems with a C-language implementation only, C-language bindings are provided for the APIs, and C-language examples are used.

Example

An example of the need for layout transformations is the implementation of the support for bidirectional text in Motif. This implementation involves transformations of a logical stream of bidirectional text into a physical stream presented on a display, with segment inversions and some character shaping using an intermediary explicit type of text (see Layout Transformations in Motif ). For a detailed explanation of the different terms used here, see Complex-Text Languages - An Overview .
Figure: Layout Transformations in Motif

The transformations transform the logical data to an internal explicit layout (T1), and then prepare it for presentation by inverting directional segments (T2) and shaping the national characters, symbolically represented here by lower-case letters (T3).

Target Audience

This extension benefits:

Existing applications, using internationalised functions (ISO C, XPG4, POSIX, Motif and X), that are performing logical processing without the need for layout transformations, may not be affected by this extension. The vast majority of applications that use the standard presentation services (Motif, curses, and so on) or the layout presentation services that may be provided by the operating system, with the standard defaults, should not be affected.

Approach

The set of layout functions address transformation between the layouts of text during processing and the layouts of text during presentation with appropriate APIs. The associated standard set of character classifications, mapping and text layout attributes are defined; the framework for grouping, storing and modifying these attributes is also defined.

Possible implementation examples, as well as some components of the Layout Services (such as some specific values of the layout values), have been marked in the document by shading and the letters "OP" in the margin to indicate that they are not mandatory.


Footnotes

1.
The term bidirectional languages is used throughout this document instead of "languages with a bidirectional script". The latter is the correct form, but is more cumbersome.


Why not acquire a nicely bound hard copy?
Click here to return to the publication details or order a copy of this publication.

Contents Next section Index