Was thinking of writing this for a few days, but did not came to do it.
First, congrats for the 25 years of the project!
I have seen the Lunduke video about it, and this convinced me to come back, see
if I can contribute a bit for 1.3 release.
Sadly, my contribution is much about telling about what went wrong when trying
it... but I guess it is a good contribution anyway... I hope.
I am from Quebec, a french native speaker, and tend to see a bit more about the
french things.
The first thing I noticed was the lack of french canadian keyboard layout (this
is not much important, you may skip the paragraph).
I think there was there in 1.2... or maybe I just said the same thing when 1.2
was about to be released, I don't remember clearly.
About french keyboard it is good to say I think that the local government tried
to push a new keyboard layout, officialy named
CAN/CSA Z243.200-92, called "Canadien multilingue standard" in Windows XP.
Well, as far as I can tell, even inside the governement
it was not really accepted, and we use the "French(Canada)" keyboard layout...
I am just unaware if this is associated to a standard.
Anyway, we are near 1.3 release and I guess it is too late about adding the
keyboard layout.
In the new iso I tried for 1.3 release, mem was showing memory.
I remember that for "System memory" the translation to french "mémoire sytème"
the è in système was wrong.
A very little thing, but as it come first on the screen, was noticed first.
The main problem I have is with package descriptions in FDIMPLES.
Pretty much all accented letters are coming wrong and that make them a bit hard
to read, and look much less professionnal.
I have noted that the accented letter are replaced by 2 characters (border
characters), and I think this is because they are
encoded in UTF-8 (so that most ascii letters take 1 characters, but that those
latin accented letters are encoded on two bytes).
Not verified this, just what I was/I am thinking.
I suppose they are taken from .lsm files (in french directory?) for the
packages.
But I am unsure where the packages are coming from... the builder download an
ISO (but I did not look really what ISO it is).
I also believe I have seen a C program to translate from UTF to CP850 (from old
memory, this is I think the codepage used for
french is DOS ... I did not verified if the installer had selected this code
page... ) in the mailing list... relatively recently.
I'd really would like to help toward fixing the accented letters in french
package descriptions.
I could do some manual fixing if necessary... but I would need some git
repository for that somewhere I think.
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