[OLPC-Games] Howto connect GTK mouse events to pygame events

[Bruno Coudoin]

Le mardi 29 mai 2007 à 20:38 +0200, stas zytkiewicz a écrit :
> On 5/29/07, Bruno Coudoin <bruno.coudoin at free.fr> wrote:
> 
> > Well, Stas, it's always a pleasure to argue with you. In your
> > comparison, you miss one major point for this project: i18n.
> >
> > Being based on GTK and using the GTK widget plus pango, it makes it easy
> > to build an outstanding application that works worldwide.
> That's nonsense and you know it Bruno.
> Childplay, which is pygame based, supports all languages including RTL.
> 
> The only problem which is unrelated to this is the 'shaping' for
> Arabic, pyfribidi needs to be updated to the latest fribidi version.
> Again this has nothing to do with SDL/GTK, in fact pango uses fribidi just like
> childsplay does.
> Taken from the gtk-i18n list:
> """
> ....
> FriBidi is a separate library, but Pango includes a trimmed down
> version of its source code in the pango/mini-fribidi directory.

I don't know the detail but please until it is fixed, don't say you
support Arabic, this is not usable, especially in a teaching
environment.

For example, we recently fixed GCompris for the Arabic in our falling
word activity. In this activity, random words are falling and the
children must type them on the keyboard. There was an issue with Arabic
because while the children type the answer, the last letter was not
'shaped' until the next one was typed. It was confusing and we used an
extended unicode character (Zero Width Joiner) to force the last letter
to be shaped.

That's the kind of problem we often have. I would say that more than 50%
of the time we spent on support comes from I18N issues, not necessary
bugs like this but spending time integrating translators work, voices,
word list, ... That is why, we are happy to have GTK underneath, they
share the same goal and do an outstanding job in this area.

I would add that nobody never complained that GCompris's frame rate and
animations where not smooth enough. Quite the opposite in fact, schools
are always using old systems and sometimes thin client and they really
expect us to play nice on the frame rate.

> > On the
> > GCompris side, we always have preferred to support more country and more
> > children than to propose cute animation to a few of them.
> What has language support to do with animations ?!

That's what I tried to explain you, the kind of application we do does
not require a lot of animation. For us, having properly written
instructions is much more important than having a good framerate.

> Language support is gettext and fribidi, it has nothing to do with graphics.
> Our apps are graphic based activities, we don't do fancy pango text stuff,
> we use nice big buttons and simple text.

Again, your simple text being un-readable to Arabic children and
probably others that requires shaping. BTW, pango does nothing 'fancy',
it just display the text as our users expect it to look like.

-- 
Bruno Coudoin
http://gcompris.net Free educational software for kids
http://toulibre.org Logiciel Libre à Toulouse