[openbeos] Re: Messages Translation ?
- From: "shatty" <shatty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2002 21:01:18 -0700
In my mind this has been a GE issue from the start. That is, beyond the fact
that BeOS already uses UTF-8, an encoding of Unicode. At the risk of sounding
repetitive I'd like to point people again to the GE wiki pages on this subject
at http://wiki.bebits.com/page/LocalizationIssues If you are interested in
font issues in particular, there's http://wiki.bebits.com/page/FontIssues with
links to some ideas about font support, font rendering, and the ever-popular
widget font sensitivity issue. And just for the record these are the character
layouts of chinese that I am aware of:
1. left->right, top->bottom (modern)
2. right->left, top->bottom (also modern)
3. top->bottom, left->right (not quite so modern)
4. top->bottom, right->left (traditional)
To the best of my knowledge Japanese has three writing systems:
1. kanji derived from chinese characters, used generally for nouns, and
possibly verbs?
2. hirigana which is used for phonetic spelling of native words, and for
particles/markers
3. katakana which is used for phonetic spelling of foreign words
Towards the discussion of input methods there are more than meet the eye
initially. It is not uncommon for a chinese word processor to support 10-15
input methods. That's for just chinese! Some of these are based on the
variety of romanization schemes that exist (Wade-Giles, Pinyin, etc.) and
others are based upon character parts. (Bopomofo, etc.)
It is fairly obvious to me that this level of complexity is going to require a
lot of thought and discussion. The existing mechanism in BeOS can be used to
support the existing input methods (read a little more at
http://wiki.bebits.com/page/InputMethods ) but anything beyond that is clearly
R2 or beyond. Personally I would hope mostly R2 and not much too further, but
that is just my humble opinion. :-D
Begging for more help on his pathetic GE wiki notions, Andrew
:-)
P.S. Anyone who has interest in this subject can feel free to email me off-list
for further discussion. (or drop by tycomsystems on beshare)
P.P.S. As I send this I see a message arriving from pascal who sounds pretty
informed too :-)
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