On Friday, 10 June 2005, Donald Z. Osborn wrote: > There is not a huge demand for local language applications right now.
The claim that there is no demand for a product is quite often wrong, especially when based on supposition rather than investigation. Every publisher that looked at The Wonderful Wizard of Oz turned it down on the grounds that there was no demand for American fairy tales. The only evidence they cited was that there were no American fairy tales in print--no surprise if every publisher refused to publish them. Frank Baum had to pay for the initial print run himself, even after he had several other successful titles. He eventually wrote 13 more books in the series, by popular demand, and it was continued after his death with more than 20 others. In every case involving language support in software that I have investigated, there is huge latent demand, but it is not expressed openly because everybody knows they can't get it yet. An example is Yiddish-language discussion groups, where the question of writing in Hebrew alphabet rather than Latin transliteration comes up every few years, and has still not been acted on due to lack of wide enough distribution of suitable software. (But we're close this time! Some of us have started a Free/Open Source project for Yiddish support in Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.) Your comment is also like saying that mathematicians wouldn't want to typeset their own work in the days before Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting software. It turns out that almost all mathematicians and physicists are willing or even eager to create their papers in TeX. In fact TeX has been an important option for many languages that were not well supported in Windows, Mac OS, and Unix until quite recently. Unfortunately, TeX is not suited to casual use. From <http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/bytopic.html> # Multilingual Support * Misc: The babel Package * Multilingual Bibliographies * Arabic * Armenian * Bangla and Asamese * Basque * Bengali * Burmese * Casyl * Cherokee * Chinese, Japanese, Korean * Coptic * Croatian * Czech and Slovene * Cyrillic * Devanagari * Dutch * English * Epi-Olmec * Ethiopian * French * German * Greek * Gurmukhi * Hebrew * Hungarian * Icelandic * Indian * Inuktitut * Italian * Japanese * Korean * Latin * Malayalam * Manju * Mongolian * Polish * Portuguese * Romanian * Russian * Sanskrit * Sinhala * Slovene * Somali * Spanish * Swedish * Tamil * Telugu * Tibetan * Turkish * Ukrainian * Vietnamese * Misc I went into all of this in detail in three market research studies, one on technical publishing software, one on non-Latin fonts, and one on the impact of Unicode. My computer, running Debian Linux, has keyboard layouts or IMEs for 26 of the 30 major modern writing systems, lacking Tibetan, Mongolian, Sinhala, and Thaana. All of these are in Unicode, and are supported in Free fonts. I know several people who can create a keyboard for any language, and I'm learning to do it myself, so that I can work on keyboards for Yiddish, Pali, Yoruba, and Klingon to begin with. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland http://cherlin.blogspot.com ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
