From: Christoph Freundl <Scusi@wormsofprey.org>
To: sdl@libsdl.org
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2006 14:47:02 +0100
Subject: [SDL] Encoding of window captions

Hi,

seeing that there is a discussion about the encoding of Unicode input 
messages, I would like to address a slightly related issue regarding 
the encoding of window captions for the function SDL_WM_SetCaption().

I have problems with the display of special characters in window 
captions. For example, if I like to display the German umlaut "o (o 
diaeresis) I have to write it
- in ANSI encoding (or Latin1?) on Windows: "\xF6"
- in UTF-8 encoding on Mac OS X: "\xC3\xB6"
On Linux I could not figure out a way which works reliably. Sometimes 
it works if I write the "o as plain text in the sourcecode, sometimes 
the UTF-8 encoding looks promising, but it is also possible that I 
cannot get it to work at all. From a glance at the SDL sources I see 
that it depends whether the library has been compiled with Unicode 
support in X (macro X_HAVE_UTF8_STRING) but I can see no way how to 
figure that out in my program. It also seems to me that the used 
windowmanager influences the result.

I can imagine two possible solutions for this: either, the API is 
changed such that the caption for SDL_WM_SetCaption() is always in a 
fixed encoding (maybe UTF-8?), but then of course recoding the string 
on systems that do not support UTF-8 captions is necessary. Or, there 
is a function which can tell at runtime the required encoding of 
caption strings.

Well, the display of special characters in window captions is probably 
also a special problem that occurs not very often, but I am interested 
if there is a way to solve my problem.

Regards, Christoph