Yudit!

Yudit!

(This page is just a czyborra.com community service and not the official Yudit homepage:)

What is Yudit?

Yudit stands for "Unicode editor". Yudit is the first really nice text editor for the X window system that uses Unicode (ISO-10646). And it is absolutely freeware!

Who wrote it?

Yudit was written by Gaspar Sinai <gsinai@gol.com>, a talented young Hungarian engineer who relocated to Tokio and needed a Unicode editor to correspond in the many languages he speaks.

Yudit started out as "yutex" 0.9 in 1997 and required Motif. The current yudit 1.0 is standalone and was released 1998-05-18 (announced in comp.os.linux.announce).

Yudit is implemented in C++ and compiles out of the box if you have a fairly up-to-date GNU installation.

What does Yudit look like?

Yudit's user interface is as simple and intuitive as Netscape's.

The following screenshot demonstrates how yudit looks in my particular configuration: (Don't worry if you don't understand the Russian. Yudit can also speak its default language English to you!)

[screenshot.gif]

How does Yudit encode text?

Yudit can read, write, cut and paste your text in various Unicode representation schemes (UTF-8, Java \u1234, UTF-7, or UTF-16) and older non-Unicode charsets like ISO 8859, KOI8, JIS, GB, BIG5, KSC, EUC, HZ, which can all be selected from the encoding menu. If you want to decipher a text whose encoding you cannot recognize, simply repeat reloading the file with each possible encoding until you get to see readable text. Yudit's code conversion functionality is also accessible from shell scripts through the bundled uniconv recoding command.

Yudit uses UTF-8 as its most sensible default encoding. To enable yourself to read UTF-8 mails, you can now simply add the following entry to your mailcap file:

text/plain; xviewer yudit < %s;  test=case %{charset} in \
 [Uu][Tt][Ff]-8) [ yes ] \;\;\ *) [ UTF-8 = no ] \; esac

How can I enter all those weird characters if I don't have them on my keyboard?

Yudit allows you to enter any language's characters on any ASCII keyboard using customizable input sequences (kmaps, see below) like "E$" for the U+20AC EURO SIGN, "byeol" for the U+BCC4 HANGUL SYLLABLE BYEOL or "Gorbac<e:v" to type the name of the inventor of perestroika with my Cyrillic.kmap for example. With [Control] & [i] you can quickly switch between the current and the previous input definition to type bilingual documents or to turn off a certain input definition temporarily.

You can also enter characters by Unicode number, SGML name, or RFC 1345 mnemonic, and you can cut and paste characters from other text files, and you can enter characters through the Xinput protocol for the large Chinese dictionaries.

What fonts does it use to display all these foreign characters?

Yudit can use all your X11 fonts, including the free GNU intlfonts and etl-unicode.bdf.

Nevertheless, I recommend that you install the FreeType library first because yudit will link it and then you can make full use of the more beautiful scalable TrueType fonts like

Can I print what I typed?

Besides screen viewing, Yudit can also print plain text in readable PostScript using the TrueType fonts, but it does not honor any formatting codes like HTML or TeX. The printing functionality is also accessible through the uniprint command that comes with the bundle.

What if I find my language not yet supported?

Yudit is customizable in a way that you can easily add support for any language you want to type, for any additional charsets you need, and for any font you want to use, in a central $YUDITDATA directory or in your local $HOME/.yudit/ without having to recompile the yudit binary. The current configuration syntax has quite a few imperfections, though.

Yudit does not do the bidirectional reordering and glyph reshaping needed for full Unicode support yet. But if you don't mind this condition, you can even use Yudit for complex scripts such as Arabic, with the help of my arabjoin perl script.

How good an editor is Yudit?

Apart from the Unicode features, yudit is a very basic and straightforward editor whose editing functionality is comparable to that of the Xaw xedit and the UW pico rather than to vi or emacs. Yudit does have three useful help pages and a find/replace popup but it does not seem to have ambitions to provide macro or regexp facilities or more comfortable editor features like an undo ring.

Where can I download Yudit?

The Yudit source code is available from the SunSite archive ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/apps/editors/X/ and its many mirrors - it may already be on your latest Linux CD!

"There appear to be few if any technical reasons to move from UNIX to Windows NT. The performance of Linux exceeds that of NT 4.0 and Linux appears to be more reliable. ..." - David Korn <dgk@research.att.com> on page 144 of the Proceedings of the USENIX Windows NT Workshop - August 11-13, 1997.

What else do you have to offer?

Attached here, in the directory http://czyborra.com/yudit/, you find the modest collection of my personal contributions to the Yudit system. Enjoy!

Roman Czyborra
roman@czyborra.com
$Date: 1998/06/28 23:39:13 $
[ICO]NameLast modifiedSizeDescription

[PARENTDIR]Parent Directory  -  
[   ]DEC_MCS.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:31 396  
[   ]8859_6.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:42 429  
[   ]8859_8.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:42 446  
[   ]8859_15.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:12 447  
[   ]8859_3.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:14 512  
[   ]8859_11.bumap.gz1998-06-27 10:04 516  
[   ]CP1252.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:13 559  
[   ]8859_13.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:12 614  
[   ]yudit-0.99.patch31998-04-18 15:08 694  
[   ]CP850.bumap.gz1998-06-27 10:05 720  
[   ]CP1251.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:13 726  
[   ]CP866.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:17 762  
[   ]CP1250.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:13 763  
[   ]KOI8_F.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:17 763  
[   ]VISCII.bumap.gz1998-05-12 11:08 778  
[   ]CP852.bumap.gz1998-06-27 18:30 818  
[   ]MAC_ROMAN.bumap.gz1998-06-27 10:07 939  
[   ]CP437.bumap.gz1998-06-25 02:14 959  
[   ]Esperanto.kmap1998-04-20 01:05 1.0K 
[   ]Polish.kmap1998-04-17 20:48 1.1K 
[   ]Hebrew.kmap1998-06-17 23:57 1.2K 
[   ]Czech.kmap1998-06-10 00:53 1.8K 
[   ]French.kmap1998-06-10 00:57 2.1K 
[TXT]rjabinushka.txt2007-09-24 18:01 2.1K 
[   ]Danish.kmap1998-04-17 19:29 2.2K 
[   ]Guarani.kmap1998-09-25 08:08 2.2K 
[   ]German.kmap1998-06-18 18:55 2.2K 
[   ]Arabic.kmap1998-06-20 17:16 2.4K 
[   ]Dutch.kmap1998-04-18 10:44 3.7K 
[   ]Cyrillic.kmap1998-04-18 14:02 6.3K 
[IMG]screenshot.gif1998-06-28 06:10 7.5K 
[TXT]HEADER.html2001-02-16 20:08 7.6K 
[   ]Vietnamese.kmap1998-05-09 02:00 8.5K 
[   ]Troff.kmap1998-09-23 19:18 12K 
[   ]TeX.kmap1998-09-25 07:57 14K 
[   ]SGML.kmap1998-11-09 18:39 18K 
[   ]Ethiopic.kmap1998-12-09 19:41 20K 
[IMG]rjabinushka.png2007-09-24 17:56 44K 
[   ]yudit-1.0.tar.gz1998-05-18 13:58 835K 
[   ]eurobsdcon2016-utf8.pdf2016-09-27 10:08 3.1M 

Apache Server at czyborra.com Port 80