Re: Thoughts and questions about input

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@mandrakesoft.com> writes:

> Kaixo!
> 
> On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 01:19:54AM -0500, Shahbaz A Chaudhary wrote:
> 
> > Now switching between multilingual typing modes is different from
> > switching between overall gui translation.  By that I mean an Urdu user
> > may be using english version of X-windows, but just need the ability to
> > type a few lines in Urdu--which is when we need quick and simple mode
> > switching.
> 
> The correct way of doing that in the current X11 framework is to set
> the locale to Urdu, then force menus to English; eg:
> 
> LC_ALL=ur
> LANGUAGE=en
> 
> As the LC_ALL (LC_CTYPE in fact) will determine the usable fontsets,
> but also will determine wether a given eyboard layout will be fully usable
> or not.

I certainly hope we can provide nicer user interfaces to this in the
long term than setting environment variables. :-)

(As well as interfaces that allow switching the input language on the fly)

> > If the user wants his/her whole gnome environment to switch
> > from displaying menus etc. in english to urdu, then I don't see a great
> > need for quick changes (but then again I don't think Pango needs to worry
> > about this anyway).
> 
> The problem for languages written right to left is that no current gtk+
> widget provides support for them.
> Once Gtk+ text widgets provides support for it (trough pango probably);
> then it will as easy to translate any programe to Urdu than to any other
> language.
> In fact the translations could be done right now; it is simply that it
> will be wasted work; as they cannot be *displayed* currently.

It will be a while before RTL translations of GTK+ or GNOME applications
are going to be useful, simply because that will require application
authors to upgrade to GTK+-1.4; which will require us to release 1.4.
This is not going to happen for a number of months more. 

But if anybody wants to to tackle the .po files for GTK+ itself (which
are quite small), that would have immediate benefits, at least for
the purposes of nice screenshots.

Regards,
                                              Owen