[openbeos] Re: Messages Translation ?

hjc> I do know a thing or too about languages, Most latin based
hjc> languages would be the easiest to do b/c you dont need any
hjc> special characters, except maybe an accent mark here and there.

The "accent mark here or there" is not really trivial sometimes (what
if there's more than one, ...). Designing a proper Unicode
input/output engine is (a) necessary, (b) tough and (c) an R2 issue
(but no R3 issue, in my opinion). The question is what level of
support FreeType offers already.

hjc> But with  russian that is a different ball park, the alphabete is
hjc> a bit different but should be easily done.

Well, OpenBeOS is a Unicode-based system. If there is support for
Latin, then rendering of Cyrillic is not a problem at all. It's really
only different letters.

hjc> Now the phoenician based languages e.g. arabic and hebrew those
hjc> are the tough ones b/c of the alphabete so someone would need to
hjc> know the workings of one or the other for it to be localized.

There's even more difficult cases (Indic scripts). For Arabic you
basically need support for right-to-left input/output and glyph
replacement in the font output engine. Indic scripts need glyph
reordering, too. Indic scripts include Thai, which you mentioned under
Far Eastern; while Thailand may be in the Far East, Thai script is an
Indic script and a more difficult one.

hjc> But other than the languages that are not roman based then you
hjc> shouldnt run into any problems.

Well, these non-Roman languages happen to be used in a number of
nations that are heavily into computing and that have close to 2.5
billion native speakers, put together...

hjc> So it can be done it would just take some time finding
hjc> the people who know how the languages work and if needed to
hjc> design a font for the different script styles like with the
hjc> far-east languages (japanese, chinese, korean, and thai if there
hjc> are more please forgive me.) But yes it can be done.

Hm... If there's anyone volunteering to design a CJK font with the
2.500 or so essential glyphs for Korean and the 10.000 or so essential
glyphs for Chinese and Japanese, I'd like to meet him/her :-))

Philipp

Other related posts: