Following my enquiry about the ubiquity of system-wide special characters palettes:
On 18/09/2006, at 3:29 PM, F Wolff wrote: > If you mean do the operating systems have _some_ way of entering these > characters, I guess all of them do. But finding your special L with > circumflex below in the character map (each time) can be time > consuming > and frustrating and is no way to type. I suppose I'm lucky. The OSX special characters palette, like the fonts palette, has a "Favourites" section. So you can keep your often- used characters handy. I also modified my keyboard layout to include the characters I was often swapping keyboards to access (e.g. all the Shift-number characters, characters like æ and « ») or getting from the special characters palette. But there are the ones I use less often, like the Greek characters: the palette is fine for them. > Of course, these clickable > characters aren't either, but at least they save some time and is drop > dead easy to use (in the browsers that they work in). > > I'd be interested to know if this will be at all useful for languages > like Vietnamese with combined diacritics, or languages with complex > input methods - I have no experience with that. All the South African > languages that we work on have all their characters defined in > unicode. > I guess for many languages there will simply be too many characters to > put there. Then again, if you don't have a keyboard layout I guess > this > could still be useful. For Vietnamese: certainly if you don't have a keyboard layout, or if you haven't been able to, or don't know how to install your input method. If you do have your input method built in (OSX) or have installed those packages (other OS), you don't need the clickable characters. However, their presence in Wikisource-VI etc. indicates there must be a lot of people without proper input access for our language. Until recently, very little software had been translated into our language, so most people couldn't access computers, even if they were available. I'm hoping the translations, and moves to increase hardware access, will mean more people finding out how to input our language. You can have a look at the clickable characters in Wikisource or Wiktionary (I think), by entering the Vietnamese section and ostensibly starting to edit (Sửa) a page. It looks very messy, but is evidently needed. Again, my lucky position in being able to afford a Mac means I'm a bit distanced from the experience of most people in my community: I have my input system built-in, and a selection of excellent keyboard layouts. It was a surprise to me that there _was_ any input difficulty. I'm kicking myself a bit about that. I should have worked with third-world situations long enough not to assume anything. Then again, the other main OS aren't the third world. BTW, having your characters defined in Unicode doesn't mean they are necessarily available in a font or input system. The less usual they are, the less likely they are to be supported. I found that out early on in Unicode, because our character range is quite unusual, lurches wildly from one area to another, and thus is often not included or properly covered in what people fondly imagine is "full Unicode support" or "a full Unicode font". > > I'm also wondering if this might be useful for people with entirely > different script to include the Latin alphabet there for the few > things > that they want to leave untranslated / untransliterated. This way they > don't need to know a Latin based layout. It could be. Do we have translators here using non-Roman alphabets who can comment on this? from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do) http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Translate-pootle mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/translate-pootle
