Re: How to get started

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Jan <jandersen striva com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm fairly new to international language programming, although I've been
> a programmer for over 20 years now. Where do I start? (In terms of how
> best to prepare myself for the task: what to read etc).
> 
> My project is as follows: I am studying Chinese and I want to make a
> simple tool that I can use for making linguistic notes - something like
> a 'dictionary', more or less. It would allow me to enter Chinese
> phrases, their pronunciation in eg. pinyin and/or bopomofo and comments
> in English or any language I might choose at the time (perhaps even a
> mix?), and it should have search facilities - especially a radical index.
> 
> Apart from the obvious things, such as a simple database to hold my
> notes, I realise that I need to communicate with whatever controls input
> methods on Linux (as well as perhaps other UNIXes?) and I need to
> display Chinese fonts. I already use Redhat 8 which gives me Chinese
> environment as well as Glade for designing the X applications. All I
> need, really, is information about where to start reading.

There is really not much about the tool you describe that is 
"international". Basically, with GTK+ 2 and Unicode, text is just 
text. 

The only real question is that of input method. System integration
of mixed input methods is not very good on Linux currently.
But for the type of text you describe above, it doesn't actually
sound like you need a mixed input method; a Chinese input method
like xcin should good enough.

But in any case, that's more of a user configuration issue than
a programmer issue.

Regards,
                                        Owen