I’m just starting out with Qt4 and C++ and came up with this semi-useful little tool for marking up Egyptian hieroglyphs in MdC.

So far the only annoying Qt-quirk I’ve found is the lack of support for non-BMP unicode characters in the QChar type. Turns out you need to use a QString with two QChars, which is exactly the situation which QChar is supposed to solve (by being larger than 8 bits so that there is a 1-1 correspondence between written characters and QChars in a string).

The unfortunate hack I had to put in for fetching a hieroglyph from a codepoint looked like this:

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

/**
 * Return a QString from a unicode code-point
 **/
QString MainWindow :: unicode2qstr(uint32_t character) {
    if(0x10000 > character) {
        /* BMP character. */
        return QString(QChar(character));
    } else if (0x10000 <= character) {
        /* Non-BMP character, return surrogate pair */
        unsigned int code;
        QChar glyph[2];
        code = (character - 0x10000);
        glyph[0] = QChar(0xD800 | (code >> 10));
        glyph[1] = QChar(0xDC00 | (code & 0x3FF));
        return QString(glyph, 2);
    }
    /* character > 0x10FFF */
    return QString("");
}

The Qt developer tools get a 10/10 from me though. I say this mainly because glade runs like a slug at the best of times.