On 25/10/2006, at 5:16 PM, Jean Christophe André wrote:
Clytie Siddall a écrit :Vietnamese is famous for breaking supposed "complete" Unicode support,I still can't understand this point... There is pre-composed charactersand there are input issues on various systems.for every single Vietnamese characters and accents combinations and Unicode recommend to always use the shortest representation. We don't need characters combining at all so Unicode level 1 is far enough for Vietnamese!
Indeed it should be. ;)However, not every system, and not every application used on every system, does these things properly.
I remember the months of frustration caused me by the default Mac OSX Unicode Vietnamese keyboard layout being ... decomposed.
Not that it told you that: I only found out after a lot of trial and error: for example, applications based on Carbon can't handle decomposed characters, where Cocoa apps can. So what displays correctly in Safari doesn't in Mozilla. In one otherwise extremely well-written and famous app., the accents actually detached from the parent vowel and followed the cursor around the screen!
I have also found plenty of applications which claim to support Unicode fully, but still have issues with inputting or displaying Vietnamese, even when you're using a precomposed layout.
So the standard is fine. It's how people implement it that varies.Vietnamese, due to its combined diacritics, is an effective test case for Unicode support in software. I expect that I will have an _interesting_ time in X11 with OOo in Vietnamese.
Now, if there still is some vietnamese input softwares producingcharacter combining sequences, then those ones are broken and should be fixed. Note that some modern vietnamese input softwares allow to choosebetween composed or pre-composed characters and use the latter by default, which is the "Right thing to do"™ IMHO.
Indeed precomposed should be the default. It removes a lot of issues. However, as I said above, input is not the only area where problems can occur. Each piece of software has to display the input ... and they all do it in their own way.
Regardless, I think we can plan for workable builds, if not the complete release, by the date of this event in Vietnam. :)Even if we can't distribute these at this event, we would have another occasion in november. Because I miss free time this week, I won't be able to produce a new Ubuntu-vi release (vietnamese activated Ubuntu live+install CD, see attachment) for this event. I will do it most probably in two weeks and we could integrate the full 2.1 vietnamese build at this time.
Great. :)We submitted our file for test builds a few days ago, so we should have builds very soon. I keep checking the server. ;)
It would be good if your systems could use as much localized software as possible: see our overall project page at <http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n>. Most of these, we hope, would be in the standard releases.All our offices are required to use Ubuntu on every public desktops.Hopefully, Ubuntu does integrate a lot of localization works! Those thatare not yet integrated should find their way to enter the Ubuntu repository (not that hard). I may help on this point.
Ubuntu has done a very sensible thing by focussing on the user experience. However, its handling of localization still leaves a great deal to be desired. Even aside from the access- and quality- control problems in Rosetta, Ubuntu often uses out-of-date versions of software/translations. In fine, its upstream behaviour needs work.
I hope its current version has most of the current localized material. If not, maybe we can introduce more of it into your Vietnamese Ubuntu release. Each extra translation means more access for users, and current translations mean higher quality, so I'm keen to optimize this situation if I can. :)
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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