On Ma, 2006-09-18 at 17:32 +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote: > 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.
I think that editing the layout is out of reach of many non-technical people. It might even be impossible using an unprivileged account (like in an Internet café). > > > 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. It seems like about 147 characters if all the upper case characters are included. (Weird number - it seems that no upper case '₫' is provided.) With good spacing to seperate the characters visually, this ends up taking up a lot of space in Pootle underneath the buttons, and might frustrate those who have proper input configured. Perhaps only common ones should be provided in such a case. For Vietnamese, perhaps all the upper case characters except 'Đ' can be removed. Perhaps we should be popping it up with some fancy effect when you hover over some area. > > 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 was actually mixing things in my writing. I meant that we don't need combined diacritics - there are code points for all the characters we need. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
