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by nyanpasu64 1754 days ago
Dear ImGui does not support Arabic (right-to-left, glyph shaping) and will not support Arabic (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1343). I don't think it supports accessibility either.

As much as I struggle with Qt's APIs (aging janky Widgets, half-baked QML on the desktop, the item models are an impenetrable byzantine enterprisey API that's simultaneously too open-ended, not flexible enough since it imposes its add/remove/move schema on your model, and too buggy), building a GUI from the ground up is not going to give you internationalization or accessibility, and Qt is.
1 comments
AussieWog93 1754 days ago
>Dear ImGui does not support Arabic (right-to-left, glyph shaping) and will not support Arabic (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/1343).

Vanilla ImGui doesn't, but I both wrapped my head around and then rewrote the text renderer in all of 2 days as a junior dev.

This version could support arbitrarily many UTF-8 codepoints with kerning and all and had a negligible performance hit on the machines I tested on. I never upstreamed it (left the company before the product that was using it shipped, actually), but it wouldn't be too hard to reproduce.

That's what I love about exposed, lower-level frameworks like Dear ImGui.

We didn't aim for accessibility, but I'm sure that would have also been semi-trivial for a dedicated dev who understands what's required.

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lavabiopsy 1754 days ago
Maybe you want to help this person who is trying to integrate harfbuzz: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/4227

The other major thing missing in relation to that is input method support.

The problem with those type of APIs and accessibility is that implementing screen reader support basically means making it retained mode in some capacity, because accessibility APIs expect you to export a tree of objects and push state updates.

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AussieWog93 1754 days ago
>Maybe you want to help this person who is trying to integrate harfbuzz: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/4227

Looks like theirs is far more advanced than mine (mine would just generate a texture per string and cache it, the main problem it solved was being able to display non-ASCII filenames). I don't think there's much I could contribute to them at all.

>accessibility APIs expect you to export a tree of objects and push state updates

Is this an inherent limitation with the tech itself, or just an arbitrary API limitation?

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lavabiopsy 1753 days ago
This is the way these platform APIs are designed, you could theoretically make a screen reader that doesn't need that and just asks the app to recompute its state every time, but they don't currently work that way.
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