Exploring Python for next desktop GUI Project

[Michael Torrie]

On 07/24/2014 01:11 PM, Glenn Linderman wrote:
> Not knowing any of these GUI platforms (although I've read some about 
> Tk), I have some questions.
> 
> * Which of them use UTF-8 as their native Unicode interface?
> 
> * Which makes it easiest to discover and adjust font metrics such as 
> kerning?
> 
> * Which makes it easiest to obtain bounding rectangles of a piece of text?
> 
> * Which makes it easiest to use a set of fonts such as Times (for Latin) 
> and others for Cyrillic, Chinese, and Korean? Or which supplies a font 
> configuration that can "just be used" for any language?

Given these new requirements, I think Qt with either PyQt or PySide is
really your only choice.  See the official Qt docs (C++, but same API
and will give you an idea of what's possible):
http://qt-project.org/doc/ .  Qt is probably the best documented of any
GUI framework.  On Windows and Mac it uses the native widget drawing
dlls so things appear native.  Making them feel native will require some
attention on your part, though. For example dialog ttgbutton order,
though I think there are convenience functions for doing that.  Qt is
fully unicode throughout.  Don't worry about what encoding is used
behind the scenes generally.  You can encode to UTF-8 when writing bytes
out, and decode from UTF-8 when reading bytes in.