Re: Promoting Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org

[Clytie Siddall]

And hello again :)

On 27/10/2006, at 11:08 AM, Jean Christophe André wrote:

Clytie Siddall a écrit :

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.

For those we can conclude they don't support Unicode at all! Since the
Level 1 (precomposed) is the minimum!

Exactly. But they think they do, so they claim to do so. It's only by using the software with less common languages like ours, that you find out these weaknesses. I'm not talking about software written by Vietnamese people, here. I'm talking about the general market.

So the standard is fine. It's how people implement it that varies.

I suppose you meant « it's how people *badly* implement it »... ;-)

Indeed. I was being tactful. ;)

Vietnamese, due to its combined diacritics, is an effective test case
for Unicode support in software.

Yes, we could use vietnamese combining to test Level 2, but really there

are far better test cases for this, eg scripts like Khmer, Lao, Thai,
Arabic, Hebrew, Indic, ...

I'm sure there are. I've only found that Vietnamese is effective in finding Unicode support issues, because I use it all the time. I've become a de facto debugger.

Indeed precomposed should be the default. It removes a lot of issues.

In fact I would even say « It removes almost all of issues ». The only

real issue is the input system. after that, displaying or printing is
not an issue anymore (see below).

It shouldn't be, but again we're faced with the disadvantages of systems, and software built on older bases, which were created before Unicode. A Mac computer, for example, is still MacRoman. There are plenty of mistakes which can creep through the Unicode veneer. Or so programmers tell me. ;)

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.

But it's far easier when it's precomposed, because one character is
exactly one glyph, so managing it is not different from any other
english/european script (say ISO-8859-1).

Absolutely. Precomposed makes a huge difference.

*need* to get more than Unicode Level 1 support in their software, as
soon as they agree to input using only precomposed characters.

Really, it's important to let vietnamese people realize that they don't

I don't think I'm using any software written by Vietnamese programmers, so I don't know how good Unicode support is within our community. I have found, though, that programmers who use non-Latin-1 languages are much more likely to be aware of Unicode issues, and to support them better. Programmers who are also translators do the best job of all. ;)

compliant applications) and using it every days, eg translating
applications like the wonderfull work you are doing right now.

It will make them more confident into going Unicode (developping Unicode

It would be great if we could build a mutually-supportive relationship between the free-software coding and translating communities. Most likely, some of the people I already know, write free-software. This had better go on my ToDo list.

We submitted our file for test builds a few days ago, so we should
have builds very soon. I keep checking the server. ;)

Let me now (or Mr Quỳnh, we are in the same office) when it's ready.
Then I'll look for time to integrate this in our local distribution.

Ready today!! :D

See my mail to the viOOo and vi_VN lists. Or:

ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.org/devel/680/ SRC680_m190/Build-1/

The Windows, OSX builds etc. should appear soon.



Please tell me how the installation goes!

There are already builds for Linux (see the four directories which include "native_Linux". The Vietnamese builds are at the bottom of the list. They have appeared during today: I have watched them appear, and heartily wished our language code were earlier in the alphabet! The files marked simply "vi-2.1.0" should be the application. The Help files aren't up-to-date, and I have no idea what "res" is.

Ubuntu has done a very sensible thing by focussing on the user

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.

experience. However, its handling of localization still leaves a great

I can only fully agree on this, even if I really appreciate the ability

to translate things through web interface getting hints from other
translators work. I had the same problem when I attempted to translate

translations (not release yet at that time), and I didn't find any way

quite silly to me...

"gfxboot" for the Dapper 6.06 LiveCD: first I was sent to the Edgy 6.10 to migrate the translation work from one release to another, which looks

I initially wasted many hours translating out-of-date versions on Rosetta. Pootle is a much better implementation of the online translaton interface: I've used it for this project.

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

situation if I can. :)

current translations mean higher quality, so I'm keen to optimize this

I'm not sure how much work it would require to check back the
integration of localized material... It would require to check all the
PO-Revision-Date field from all the vi.po, at a minimum, isn't it?

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN

[1] http://vnoss.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=projects:l10n

If you use our Projects page [1] as a guide, you can see which apps. should already be translated. There are links to the status pages. So you can simply make a list of the currently-translated software, or check the pages when you find software which does not appear to be translated. GNOME has been completely translated for several versions, so it's probably the most likely desktop to be supported, even in Ubuntu. KDE (re-supported from 3.5) and Xfce, however, are not far behind. The Mozilla applications suffer, as OOo did, from previously stalled projects: we hope to get to them soon. Most of the GNU base software has been translated (see the TP pages), major graphics programs like GIMP, Inkscape and FontForge are completely translated, plus chat clients like Psi (separate project) and XChat (TP). Quite a few "separate" programs, like XChat, are translated in one of the main projects, so it's worth checking is application ABC is listed on the GNOME or TP status pages. We've put a lot of work in in the last couple of years, so there is a great deal more localized material available now. Including unofficlal but current translations of the GPL, OFL and LGPL. :) from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)

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