On Saturday 29 March 2003 08:13 am, Pablo Saratxaga wrote: > Kaixo! >> On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 12:37:49AM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > > Note that even if they are not "racists", the result (that > > there are few internationalized softwares) > > I don't understand how you can say there are few i18n > programs; on my current GNU/Linux system it's the opposite: > the non-i18n programs are the minority. > > Tell me about one single current major program/project that > doesn't have i18n support (maybe there are, and I'm just not > aware of it (probably because a modern software without i18n > support is not worth it in my eyes).
Well, you are both right. There is no program that supports all languages. There is no program that supports all of the writing systems defined in Unicode 3.2, or even Unicode 1.0. But almost all programs that accept text input can accept input in any alphabet supported by installed fonts, operating system rendering, and available keyboard layouts. I just tried a few programs on my Mandrake system at random, with remarkably good results. Unfortunately, from a Japanese point of view, the situation is much worse, because support for Japanese IMEs has to be put into aplications explicitly at present, and automatic support for Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, or Hindi doesn't help Japanese users much. Anyway, I just tried a few programs on my Mandrake system at random, and found no difficulty typing in Russian, Georgian, and other alphabets. Most programs can copy to and from the clipboard in multiple alphabets, though not all. If we figure out a way to funnel IME input through the normal character input calls, we might well achieve CJK support in the majority of apps. -- Edward Cherlin Generalist & activist--Linux, languages, literacy and more "A knot! Oh, do let me help to undo it!" --Alice in Wonderland -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
