Re: [hpoj-devel] LCD encoding

[Joe P. <joe...@sn...>]

On Wednesday 07 April 2004 03:35, Dima Vukolov wrote:
> Hi!
>
> There was a report that xojpanel and 'ptal-hp display' do not show cyrillic
> text correctly. 

Can you supply more info about the issue?  Which peripherals (that you know 
of) exhibit the problem?  Do the cyrillic characters display correctly on the 
device's built-in LCD screen (under Linux)?  Are only a few characters 
displayed incorrectly? When characters are not displayed correctly, do other 
characters appear in their place, or do they simply not appear? 

> They output raw data from the device, in this case in 
> iso8859-5, and no convertion to the system's locale is performed.

By default, xojpanel does some simple ASCII character-for-character 
translations, but the feature is hard-coded.  It can be turned off, however, 
using the '-notrans' option.  Have you tried that? The feature was added 
because some peripherals display 'special' characters on their LCD that are 
not part of any standard charset, and could not be easily displayed by 
xojpanel or 'ptal-hp display'.

In case the problem is font-related, you could try rebuilding xojpanel with a 
different default font specified. It's currently set to "Courier".

> What's the best way to add such recoding to xojpanel? 

Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with internationalization issues. A 
little reading turned up the lesstif/Motif/openMotif function 
"XmStringCreateLocalized(text)", which at first glance looks like it might be 
possible to use it as a conversion wrapper for the strings 'Line1' and 
'Line2' in xojpanel.cpp, but I'm really just guessing at this point. 

If I were to try making xojpanel locale-aware, I wouldn't be able to test for 
correct cyrillic display, due to my not having a printer available that 
outputs that charset.

> Is it possible to
> retrieve the language the device is using for LCD?
> And is there any 
> information on whether all HP devices use exclusively iso8859-5 for
> cyrillic or not?

I don't know. Is there any other encoding that could be used to display 
cyrillic? If iso8859-5 contains all of the needed characters for russian and 
russian-related languages, it probably would be the one used.

The HP people *should* be able to answer this for you, but they haven't been 
around much lately.

-- 
Joe Piolunek