Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

[ancalimon]

I don't know how other languages work..

But in order to display turkish non-English characters on amigaos, you need these things:

a turkish keymap + turkish modified fonts.

The modified fonts traditionally have a "-iso9" at the end of the filename.

You have to clean some characters from the fonts and redraw a Turkish equivalent of that character.

I have a suggestion.

What if we had a little updated setmap program that is called from startup-sequence that loads a small bitmap file that automatically assign them to keys? (and even adds a generic special characters bitmap fonts file that do not have a turkish (or other language) bitmap file?

this way, we would not need separate font files for all languages we want to use.

For example:

c:setmap en tr pl

would load the files generic-tr, generic-pl, helvetica-tr, helvetica-pl (and all other xxx-tr xxx-pl files available for all fonts) and appends them to fonts.

There could be a shortcut that would switch different keymaps and/or fonts.

Can this be done for all AmigaOS versions including 4.1 ?

There is also the problem with I and i letters with Turkish. In Turkish I and i letters are totally different letters. "I" is capital of "?", and "?" is capital of "i"

So a program called "Information" is actually different than a program called "information". There actually are two different keymaps for Turkish because of this in OS4.1 fe that I have. (something like I=? and I=i) I remember choosing one of the options and Had many problem after installation and later I choose the other option.

When creating a Turkish iso9 font, you do not change little "i" to "?" but make the modified letter for little "?" to little "?". As a result, the font prefs program previews to fonts as this:

AaBbÇcDdEeFfGg??HhIi?iJjKkLlMmNnOoÖöPpRrSs??TtUuÜüVvYYyZz

Instead of this:

AaBbCcÇçDdEeFfGg??HhI??iJjKkLlMmNnOoPpRrSs??TtUuÜüVvWwXxYyZz

Also both the English and Turkish font has Ww and Xx and Qq missing from preview of Fonts prefs. (the keys are of course there when you press them since they also are on Turkish keymaps)


How can this be fixed?