Re: report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody should explicitly care about it

["Dinesh Nadarajah" <dxn1972 hotmail com>]

So what does this mean for translators? Are we better off waiting for Gnome 
v 3.0 when most of the support will be available to begin translation.

I work on a translation team that works on all platforms and software and I 
agree. After having used KDE 2.0, it does indeed have excellent i18n 
support. What happened to all that unicode based support in Gnome?

-D


>From: Vlad Harchev <hvv@hippo.ru>
>To: gnome-hackers@gnome.org, gnome-i18n@gnome.org, 
>gnome-devel-list@gnome.org
>Subject: report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody should 
>explicitly care about it
>Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 20:57:42 +0400 (SAMT)
>
>
>  Hello,
>
>  Executive summary: most gnome apps don't support i18n adequately and are
>mostly unusable or even non-functional for non-latin1 (and sometimes for
>non-ASCII) users. This can be fixed by a dedicated gnome-i18n hacker 
>though. I
>can (and would like to) take this position if some ogranization/company 
>hired
>me.
>
>  GNOME-1.4 can be considered an advanced desktop environment from a lot of 
>of
>perspectives. Unfortunately, i18n of applications shipped with it is not 
>one
>of these perspectives. Literally every application and library (with a rare
>exception - some of them were fixed - some of them by me personally) that 
>deal
>with file formats that are understood by other applications too (i.e. 
>widely
>spread formats such as XLS, WMF) or any protocol that transmits text (mail,
>news) don't support i18n at all or even sometimes anything except ASCII is 
>not
>supported correctly. This means that non-latin users are unable to use 
>these
>applications and applications that use such libraries - in the best case 
>such
>applications don't allow interchange of data in these widespread format or
>using such protocols (peers of the users can't open/use data produced by 
>such
>applications and users of such applications can't open data produced by 
>their
>peers) rendering applications unusable in networked environment of today, 
>and
>in the worst case such applications don't support even basic operations too
>(e.g. printing or saving file in the way that won't cause data loss)!
>
>   Transition to gtk-2.0 will *not* solve majority of these problems since
>special support and changes in design is needed to support at least import 
>and
>export of the widely spread file formats and handling of information
>transmitted via protocols like mail and news (since most often textual
>information stored in such formats uses arbitrary or different from the 
>user's
>locale encoding). Transition to gtk-2.0 will simplify solving or even solve
>some basic problems like typing text and not seeing it in proper font 
>though -
>but when it will happen? Just to mention that KDE applications don't suffer 
>at
>least from these basic problems and KDE apps work much better for 
>non-latin1
>users..
>
>   It's obvious why i18n support should be raised to adequate level, the 
>sooner
>the better, even if comfort and feelings of non-latin1 gnome users are 
>ignored
>(as usual, cough) - just in order gnome to be considered as viable 
>computing
>environment by non-latin users/goverments/distibution vendors/ hackers who
>want to hack on some desktop environment.
>
>   I think no more than 1.5 month of work needed for fixing 90% of all 
>software
>and libraries shipped with fifth toe and gnome (evolution not included, 
>fixing
>it will require almost 2 weeks IMO). So I think dedicated professional i18n
>hacker position would be a must have for gnome project, and work of this
>person will make gnome friendly (or at least working adequately) for
>non-latin1 users. These estimations are made by professional eye and brain
>(mine), since I've implemented complete i18n framework for AbiWord (now it
>supports even CJK languages without any flaws from i18n perspective),and
>recently fixed remaining i18n problems in gnome-print and in gnumeric and
>worked on various aspects of gtk dealing with i18n issues.
>
>  I can and would like to take that position of i18n hacker of gnome 
>project
>provided some company or organization sponsored my work or even better 
>hired
>me.
>
>  What do you think about all this?
>
>  Best regards,
>   -Vlad
>
>
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