Microwindows v0.88 will provide greatly enhanced support for Far Eastern languages. The new release adds support for Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean fonts, using four different character encoding standards. Beta version 0.88pre9, containing the new support, is currently available for download from the Microwindows project website.

Support for the global standard Unicode-16 and Unicode-32 encodings, combined with Microwindows' support of TrueType font rendering allows many free and proprietary Chinese, Kanji, and Japanese fonts to be used in both the emulated Win32/WinCE API, as well as the Xlib-like Nano-X APIs.

In addition, the Chinese National Standard GB2312 character encoding has been added, which uses multi-byte sequences to accomodate a wide range of Chinese characters. Fixed size 12×12 and 16×16 Chinese fonts, along with matching ASCII fonts allow both Chinese and ASCII text to be used in the same output stream. The popular Big5 encoding is also supported as well. A number of Han Zi Ku and Song fonts have also been contributed.

The Chinese in particular have taken a very strong interest in the Microwindows Project, as evidenced by the high level of activity on the Microwindows mailing list. Other recent contributions from China include completing the Win32/WinCE custom controls for Windows emulation. These include the standard edit box, listbox, radio, checkbox and static controls. It appears there are quite a few Windows programmers in China, and they want to take advantage of this freely available Win32 emulation targeted for small devices.

About Microwindows

Microwindows is an Open Source project aimed at bringing the features of modern graphical windowing environments to smaller devices and platforms. Microwindows allows applications to be built and tested on the Linux desktop, as well as cross-compiled for the target device. Microwindows' genesis was with the NanoGUI project, and has now been combined into a single distribution. The Win32/WinCE API implementation is known as Microwindows, and the Xlib-like API implementation is known as Nano-X.

Greg Haerr, Microwindows project leader, says “Microwindows is still the only completely free, open source graphical windowing system emulating the Win32 API, and targeting the Linux framebuffer.”

Related stories:
Linux + Microwindows: challenger to WinCE
Enabling embedded Linux graphical applications
The Microwindows and NanoGUI Projects
Display connectivity solution for embedded Linux devices

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.