Series of Linux localizations coming out of Asia

Imran William Smith writes "The Asian Open Source Centre is reporting a series of recent successes in translating Linux to Asian languages, where there are also many complex font issues to be solved. This site has a wealth of information about open source and free software activity in Asia."

not as promising as it appears

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is good to see more languages supported, but in this world software = English. The mass of programmers largely either live in English speaking countries, or countries like Germany and Scandinavia which are switching over to English. The attitude towards languages in software development is "learn English, tough".
Multilingualism is barely even an afterthought in software development.

Utter nonsense

[GCP]

Too bad I'm so late responding, but in case anybody reads this:

All major platforms are expending serious resources to internationalize. Java and .Net are both based on Unicode. The only two text encodings that all conformant XML readers/writers are *required* to understand are both forms of Unicode. The document character set for all HTML documents changed to Unicode in HTML 4 (and thereafter). Perl, as of 5.6, changed over to being entirely Unicode internally. Oracle and Microsoft both recommend buiding a

Re:Utter nonsense

[Moridineas]

The poster couldn't be more right!

And once again, OpenBSD is taking the innovative lead--pf now has [deadly.org] better bilingual support than any other packet filtering software out there!

This would be great

[Krellan]

I think this would be great. I don't know how to read Asian languages but like to have support for them nonetheless, because I'm fascinated by various writing systems used all over the world.

Problems I see:

* What to do about the text console? Would the framebuffer console become mandatory, since VGA text can only support 512 unique characters (nowhere near enough for Asian languages)? One of the strengths of Linux is its extremely fast text console updating, and on many systems I've chosen to keep the standard VGA text instead of going to framebuffer mode for this very reason.

* What to do about fonts? Making full Unicode fonts is very expensive and time-consuming. There are some free fonts already but nowhere near the level of fonts available for standard ASCII.

* What about software that is hardcoded to use 8-bit characters? The tcsh shell comes to mind.

* What about IME's (input method editors)? Are they smoothly integrated with all X applications, or are they hardcoded to only work inside of one specific application? A global IME will be needed, if it does not exist already. Also, an equivalent IME will be needed for console mode, if that is supported.

I'm assuming UTF-8 will become the standard encoding format. That will be a good thing, as it provides a smooth upgrade path.

Translating error messages and the like should be easy. Accepting input from the user, and handling it properly, will be harder.

My guess is that full I18N will be possible only in graphical mode, and that text mode will still be assumed to be English. Many distributions are defaulting to graphical mode these days, leaving text mode solely for the advanced user who has manually customized their setup. I use text mode all the time, for speed and other issues, and would hate to see it deprecated due to the difficulty of getting it to work internationally.

Re:

[account_deleted]

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