Amharic Experience w/GNOME 2

[Daniel Yacob <locales geez org>]

Greetings,

Late last week I finally installed RedHat 8 and for the first time
was able to see the Amharic (am) translations in action.  I had some
surprises, both good and bad, that I thought I'd share here.  My
intent is to offer some feedback to developers working on the i18n
components as well as to throw out some questions that I hope people
here can answer for me.  I'll also be using the response to this to
put together an Amharic-HOWTO to make the process smoother for others.
Here goes...

Installed RH8, no glitches, yay.  Added am am_ET.UTF-8 entry to both
/usr/lib/X11/locales/locales.dir and ~/.gnome2/gdm.  Next setup a
TrueType font I like in /etc/gtk/gtkrc.am_ET.utf-8.  Compiled Amharic
.pos into .mos and installed.

Q1)  Did I miss anything?

<NOTE: I've sent bug reports to XFree86 to request the am_ET.UTF-8,
ti_ER.UTF-8 and ti_ET.UTF-8 aliases in the locales.dir, but to no avail,
if anyone here can encourage them to add it -please do so!>

Logged out, logged in, voila!  Just clicking around I'm first impressed
by how pervasive i18n features are.  Sometimes too pervasive though.
For example I open a gnome terminal, nice Amharic menus, but typing in
the shell the IM is set for Amharic.  This is the right way to go with
tools like GEdit, but since bash doesn't know Amharic (I assume any
non-English) commands the first thing I have to do is set the IM back
to the default.  To then be able to type english in the gnome terminal,
I follow:   Edit > Current Profile > right click in "Profile name" >
Input Methods > Default.

Q2)  Is there a way to toggle between the "Default" and the locale
     default IM with a key sequence (Ctrl+...)?  Could not find this
     in the "Help" pages.

Now I've got english again at the command line but the font settings
mess up the terminal.  I go to change fonts under the current profile
and I'm shown a very limited number of choices.  Not finding the UCS
font (under "misc-fixed") I was looking for I open an "xterm -u8" with
my font of choice, exit gnome-terminal, and get to work.  

Q3)  What does "Monospace" actually correspond to?

Two more observations:  1) When I have a gnome-terminal open with menus
translated into one language, I could not start (from a shell) another
gnome-terminal with translations in another language.  gnome-terminal
seems to be unique with this behavior, other apps had no issue here.
2) Even with English settings I find the inter-line spacing in
gnome-terminal has become much to large, what's the story here?


Suggestions:

  1) Add the "Input Method" sub-menu to the right mouse button menu
     over the gnome-terminal background.

  2) Add ability to save IM settings as part of a profile.

  3) Add a key-binding to toggle between Default and locale-default
     if there isn't one already.

Another place of where the locale-default IM should not be the
application default would be in the security app that asks for the
root password when launching a "System Settings" item for example.
Can we actually have Unicode passwords these days?  I'm afraid to
even test this.  A font glitch here, I enter a root password and
some system settings tool comes up like "Display settings".  The
"Cancel" and "Ok" translations appeared fine when asked for the
password but in the "Display settings" window I'm seeing squares
with Unicode addresses.  The font seems to have been dropped when
the user became root -?


More on fonts...  It seems GNOME has selected the ClearlyU font
for showing me Ethiopic (though gnome-terminal indicates "Monospace" -?),
this is a great choice!  I'm very glad to see it distributed with
RH.  However, it is not what I asked for in the gtkrc.am_ET.utf-8
file.  AbiWord and Mozilla use the font I've set there, but the
GNOME 2.0 components seem to ignore it.

Q4)  How does font selection/setting work under GNOME 2.0?  The
     "Font Preference" tool also does not show fonts that I install.


So I may be picky about my terminal fonts, call me a creature of
habbit.  In all other respects I found GNOME 2 a comfortable working
environment.  Sometimes seemingly miraculous, until now only Emacs
and Yudit could do Ethiopic IMs, so to be able to type Amharic
everywhere (even when I don't want to) is pretty damn cool, like being
catapulted 20 years into the future.

thanks,

/Daniel