Re: Translations, GNOME and KDE

[Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu peacefulaction org>]

Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 18:41, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
> 
>>Kenneth Rohde Christiansen wrote:
> 
> 
>>>I am sure we can do more on the PR side. 
> 
> 
> I agree. But not in relation to KDE alone. Just on the merits of what
> Gnome is...
> 
> 
>>>This could attract more users and more translators as well :-)
>>>
>>
>>Hmm - a major advantage that GNOME had was the support for Indic 
>>languages. QT 3.2 has support for rendering Indic scripts.
> 
> 
> Yes Qt 3.2 really brought in silently some wonderful Indic Unicode
> support.
> 

btw - it still has some wierd bugs - for example today, I noticed that 
somehow it could not display the U+0964 DEVANAGARI DANDA (।) which was 
within a block of bengali text. Really wierd!
(screenshot at http://clai.net/sayamindu/index.php?p=34&more=1&c=1 - 
look for square blocks)


> 
>> However, the 
>>input of Indic scripts seems to be somewhat wierd in QT (I was testing 
>>QT 3.3.0b1).
> 
> 
> Is there a Qt-IM?

Don't think so.

> 
> 
>>On the other hand, gnome-print cannot print Indic languages, and that is 
>>turning out to be a really bad show stopper
> 
> 
> This is being fixed in a unified way I hope? 

Hmm..
I know that Jody is looking at the code from gchempaint for rendering, 
and needs testers. If you want to volunteer - get in touch with Jody :-)

> 
> 
>> - I was testing the KDE 3.2 
>>printing system yesterday, and it printed all the Indic stuff properly.
> 
> Yes indeed.
> 
> But you missed something that is much more important web browser
> support.
> We all know apart from speed Konqueror using Qt brings uniformity.
> What do we have for probably the biggest use of software on PCs
> nowadays... the Gecko engine which does not use system's layout
> capabilities. Gecko support for Indic complex text layout sucks.
> So Epiphany for Tamil sucks.
> Here lies the biggest defining difference for me between KDE and Qt.
> 
> I thought this will be the biggest winner eventually when Pango will be
> used to shape complex text for Gecko but worryingly I learnt that this
> is not for sure...
> 
> My language needs  a decent web browser on Gnome. 
> At the moment I am trying to write help files for how to setup Konqueror
> and WinXP based browsers (could anyone help please :) to view the
> reference glossary that needs to be agreed for the high quality
> translations. I have not got around to write up the 8 different IM
> layouts and techniques yet.
> 

Ahh - forgot about that.  :-P
This is a really crucial issue - but I have a Indic enabled Mozilla 
running in my own system, so I almost forgot about that - but stock 
distributions of mozilla still do not have the ability to render Indic 
text properly.
There is a patch available at 
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215219 which makes mozilla 
use Pango to do the Indic rendering stuff.
It works fine for me, except for some some minor halanth related issues 
- and I have also shipped this patched Mozilla with a LiveCD - no 
complaints yet.
-cheers-
sdg


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[ http://clai.net/sayamindu ]

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