On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 01:09:27PM +0530, Kedar Patankar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> > > > is anyone working on Internationalizing GNOME in hindi ? I know that I
> > won't
>
> As I understand it, the biggest hurdle in *truely*
> internationalizing gnome (any X app) is getting the whole X infrastructure
> to properly support unicode (iso 10646). AFAIK, xlib which is used by all
> X apps to communicate with the X server doesn't support unicode.
X supports multi byte characters. Read about Xlib internationalization
in chapters 10 and 11 of Xlib programming manual by Adrian Nye (O'Reilly)
> So it is a matter to get X understand unicode properly, and then
> make gnome/kde/whatever to support that, and finally writing the l10n
> (localization) stuff for any local language you want supported.
X doesn't have to "understand" unicode. It just needs to generate the
right symbols for the right combination of key strokes and use the
resulting encodings to lookup the right glyph in the unicode font file.
Yudit running on Xlib already does this quite well.
The problem with X has always been over generalization :-) Read about
XIM and how they handle Japanese input methods in a separate process
to help the X server. For those curious, one has to maintain a dictionary
and use the phonetics generated by the keystrokes to lookup an
ideogram (a picture representing the idea)!
The primary problem with i18n with Indian languages has been the lack of
good TTF fonts, which are standards based (ok, if people think unicode
sucks, agree on something else). X11 renderers of TTF fonts out there on
the web are less than pleasing.
Keyboard mapping is less of an issue (no ideograms! :-), as we can use
the same method used in local language typewriters. xmodmap already
does this.
-Arun
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