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1%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
2%% Name: tfontenc.tex
3%% Purpose: font encoding overview
4%% Author: Vadim Zeitlin
5%% Modified by:
6%% Created: 03.11.99
7%% RCS-ID: $Id$
8%% Copyright: (c) Vadim Zeitlin
9%% License: wxWidgets license
10%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
11
12\section{Font encoding overview}\label{wxfontencodingoverview}
13
14wxWidgets has support for multiple font encodings starting from release 2.2.
15By encoding we mean here the mapping between the character codes and the
16letters. Probably the most well-known encoding is (7 bit) ASCII one which is
17used almost universally now to represent the letters of the English alphabet
18and some other common characters. However, it is not enough to represent the
19letters of foreign alphabets and here other encodings come into play. Please
20note that we will only discuss 8-bit fonts here and not
21\helpref{Unicode}{unicode}.
22
23Font encoding support is assured by several classes:
24\helpref{wxFont}{wxfont} itself, but also
25\helpref{wxFontEnumerator}{wxfontenumerator} and
26\helpref{wxFontMapper}{wxfontmapper}. wxFont encoding support is reflected by
27a (new) constructor parameter {\it encoding} which takes one of the following
28values (elements of enumeration type {\tt wxFontEncoding}):
29
30\begin{twocollist}
31\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_SYSTEM}{The default encoding of the underlying
32operating system (notice that this might be a "foreign" encoding for foreign
33versions of Windows 9x/NT).}
34\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_DEFAULT}{The applications default encoding as
35returned by \helpref{wxFont::GetDefaultEncoding}{wxfontgetdefaultencoding}. On
36program startup, the applications default encoding is the same as
37wxFONTENCODING\_SYSTEM, but may be changed to make all the fonts created later
38to use it (by default).}
39\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_ISO8859\_1..15}{ISO8859 family encodings which are
40usually used by all non-Microsoft operating systems}
41\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_KOI8}{Standard Cyrillic encoding for the Internet
42(but see also wxFONTENCODING\_ISO8859\_5 and wxFONTENCODING\_CP1251)}
43\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_CP1250}{Microsoft analogue of ISO8859-2}
44\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_CP1251}{Microsoft analogue of ISO8859-5}
45\twocolitem{wxFONTENCODING\_CP1252}{Microsoft analogue of ISO8859-1}
46\end{twocollist}
47
48As you may see, Microsoft's encoding partly mirror the standard ISO8859 ones,
49but there are (minor) differences even between ISO8859-1 (Latin1, ISO encoding
50for Western Europe) and CP1251 (WinLatin1, standard code page for English
51versions of Windows) and there are more of them for other encodings.
52
53The situation is particularly complicated with Cyrillic encodings for which
54(more than) three incompatible encodings exist: KOI8 (the old standard, widely
55used on the Internet), ISO8859-5 (ISO standard for Cyrillic) and CP1251
56(WinCyrillic).
57
58This abundance of (incompatible) encodings should make it clear that using
59encodings is less easy than it might seem. The problems arise both from the
60fact that the standard encodings for the given language (say Russian, which is
61written in Cyrillic) are different on different platforms and because the
62fonts in the given encoding might just not be installed (this is especially a
63problem with Unix, or, in general, non-Win32 systems).
64
65To clarify, the \helpref{wxFontEnumerator}{wxfontenumerator}
66class may be used to enumerate both all available encodings and to find the
67facename(s) in which the given encoding exists. If you can find the font in
68the correct encoding with wxFontEnumerator then your troubles are over, but,
69unfortunately, sometimes this is not enough. For example, there is no standard
70way (that I know of, please tell me if you do!) to find a font on a Windows system
71for KOI8 encoding (only for WinCyrillic one which is quite different), so
72\helpref{wxFontEnumerator}{wxfontenumerator} will never return one, even if
73the user has installed a KOI8 font on his system.
74
75To solve this problem, a \helpref{wxFontMapper}{wxfontmapper} class is provided.
76This class stores the mapping between the encodings and the font face
77names which support them in \helpref{wxConfig}{wxconfigoverview} object. Of
78course, it would be fairly useless if it tried to determine these mappings by
79itself, so, instead, it (optionally) ask the user and remember his answers
80so that the next time the program will automatically choose the correct font.
81
82All these topics are illustrated by the \helpref{font sample}{samplefont};
83please refer to it and the documentation of the classes mentioned here for
84further explanations.
85