Re: Proposed: Dasher

[Ramanan Selvaratnam <rama uklinux net>]

On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 11:14, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > Dasher
> > ------
> > 
> > While Dasher has been lauded as an innovative, interesting, accessible and,
> > well, game-like approach to text entry, I'm not sure it has the same kind of
> > applicability to the Desktop release as the other a11y modules. 

Dasher must fit the Desktop release for many other reasons other than
accessibility.

Having once critisiced Microsoft's early support for Tamil through
accessibility features in their web browser  I feel bowled out to tell
the same community (Tamil languge - computing enthusiasts) forum that 
Dasher input in its rawest form is as good as I could learn to type my
complex script on my AZERTY layout...

There is definitely a lot more to game-like IMs ...maybe not via Dasher
itself.

Anyway the point to note is Dasher writes directly to UTF-8 apps.

> > I would love to see Dasher in a GNOME Accessibility Tools release, if there
> > were other modules to go with it.

Promoting Dasher from within the Accessibility Tools release alone
will not do it justice.
 
All I have been able to help with promotion so far is to point it to
people forced to spend time developing another XIM or whatever in
research institues in my domain. 

Dasher clearly is impressive and illustrates why one must think beyond
data  input/output methods that is fought over at present. 

Alongside Gucharmap and other increasing amount of i18nised tools Dasher
should also raise awareness of futuristic systems and why people should
participate in it. 
Without such awareness of the directions we can go, there will be far
less Gnome users anyway 


> 
Does dasher support Indic text properly?

As Matthew answers elsewhere, Yes the text output looks cool. 
I got Tamil to work with minimum effort some time back. 

Pango shapes everything :)

[Infact Dasher helps one to clearly see why my language is being torn
apart by the ill adviced, short sighted Unicode consortium and
inactivity in the part of people who should care about the matters so
important to our future instead of nagging and stagnating.
ie, Dasher and Gnome would go well within  an increasing community of
irritated people :), some with real expertise at linguistics and related
technologies but unaware of matters to do with software freedoms --
again some chance Gnome advocacy] 

As for input and related matters,
while looking into the dictionary/spellchecker etc. I realised how
unique Dasher was in that all further development is best left for other
central places. 
Freedesktop.org with apps like Enchant is definitely good for some
aspects imho [Please note the word desktop in freedestop]
 
To elaborate a bit more...

Hugely encouraging improovements were noticed straight in Tamil by
switching around the characters in the raw XML file  according to the
predetermined grammatical and phonetical rules. 
I did not try anything to do with speech input yet though.

The algorithms are definitely for the domain of acdemia as the current
corporate models and their interests in Desktop systems could never do
justice to i18n or freedom of algorithms.

eg: One key to Dasher's text prediction is based on the Markov Model.
Being familiar with some aspects of this I am sure it needs cooperative
academic research at international level to implement i18n in a
different level. 


> Also, last time, with GNOME 2.4, I noticed that translators tended to 
> avoid a11y tools - and I think the same may be repeated with 2.6 too.

Basically I do not understand the issues here totally but would like to state that 
some software are best helped to be perfected elsewhere.
Dasher might have needs like this.

In the Indic case I think we should aim to supply technical information
from a node like gnu.org.in imho.

[In the case of Tamil, one of the the Dravidian family,
quite different to Devanagiri based scripts and with a clear phonetics
(and what is claimed to be mathematical too) based structure/grouping
I would like to see the state University get involved via gnu.org.in.
They are already into new types of IMs etc. Two requests so far to
developers there did not get much attention but when many people ask for
it ...or even when the researcher sees Dasher we could have facilitated
some real international collaboration]

See, Dasher can provoke thought and long discussions :)Please distribute
it on the Desktop.

Best regards,

Ramanan