XLIB Programming Manual, Rel. 5, Third Edition

10.5 Internationalized Interclient Communication

You’ll need to understand non-internationalized interclient communication before reading this; see Chapter 12.

When writing an internationalized application it is not safe to assume that all interclient communication with text properties will be done with Latin-1 or ASCII strings. R5 provides some new functions that do not make this assumption. The first is a convenience routine for communication with window managers. XmbSetWMProperties() is a function very similar to XSetWMProperties(), except that the window_name and icon_name arguments are multi-byte strings (rather than XTextProperty pointers) in the encoding of the locale. If these strings can be converted to the STRING encoding (Latin-1 plus newline and tab), then their corresponding WM_NAME and WM_ICON_NAME properties are created with type STRING. If this conversion cannot be performed, the strings are converted to Compound Text (this conversion can always be done, by the definition of Compound Text), and the properties are created with type COMPOUND_TEXT. Note that there is no wide-character version of this function.

Since X properties have a single contiguous block of data as their value, they cannot directly represent types such as char **. But sometimes such a complex type must be represented (imagine a text editor setting a property to a set of disjointed selected strings). To allow this, X11R4 defined the XTextProperty structure (shown in Example 10-6) and the functions ...