Re: [g-i] freefont vs. dejavu
Hello everyone :)
This Installer will be the very first supporting my language: it's
such a huge step forward for us. There's a big conference being held
by Intel in Hanoi very soon, and Javier Sola is presenting there:
he's said he will talk about our progress. It's all very encouraging:
government and business have the distribution capacity in Vietnam, so
if we can get them on side, we will reach so many people we're not
currently reaching. Our translations are used widely among students,
educated people, some business people and the Net Café underground,
but they're not reaching most of the people, and those people who
need them most.
Another important point: it's essential to have the Installer, and
packages, also available offline (e.g. CDs), since Net access in many
countries is unreliable at best, and completely non-existent in many
cases. That is the case in Vietnam, and I heard this week from a
computing engineer in Africa who has only very occasional email
access and no download capacity at all. I know the Installer is
available on CD, but how widely available are the CDs, physically?
How about packages? I hope you don't mind me mentioning this here:
I'm not sure where to mention it.
On 16/03/2006, at 5:11 PM, Eddy Petrişor wrote:
4
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Macedonian and Ukrainian use the following to quote text:
<U201c> - Left double quotation mark
<U201e> - double low-9 quotation mark
Jutta Wrage has recently made a sumarisation of the correct quotation
marks needed for each language.
http://www.witch.westfalen.de/csstest/quotes/quotes.html
It's very useful: we have a link to it from the Translate Wiki [1].
Thankyou, Jutta. :)
Jutta, could you enlighten us?
Shall we fix those, ask the translators?
I think that characters like the bullet should't be used for the
installer: IMO those
are meant to be used in applications like Openoffice or similar.
I tend to agree, but maybe we might want to hear Clytie's opinion.
I use them fairly widely in PO files, because they don't add to the
visual clutter of a heavily-accented language. They are discrete, so
obviously (to the eye) not another character or diacritic mark.
This is useful, helps to format the text. You will notice (looking at
such PO files) that I use them to set points out clearly, to avoid
requiring complex syntax or advanced vocabulary in the translation. A
large proportion of our population is only marginally literate in
this sense: the clearer the translation, with the minimum of
syntactical embedding and educated vocabulary, the more likely the it
is to be effective, or to be read at all. Bullets function here as a
graphic aid.
For Vietnamese, bullets are appropriate. They are available in the
Latin-1 character-set, so everyone is likely to have them covered in
default-installation fonts, for those people not automatically using
a UTF-8 setting (as our users will).
I think, for all Asian languages, bullets are an appropriate way to
format the text. We have so many thin, straight or curved shapes and
no solid, centred ones. A solid bullet makes an effective contrast,
and focusses the eye. (I speak here also as a specialist on the
mechanics of reading.) This is likely to apply to all languages using
many diacritics. (However, individual languages may have their own
formatting, or a separate meaning for this character.)
I hope this is useful. :)
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
[1] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/
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