Re: Language support

[Michael Sobolev <mss@transas.com>]

On Mon, Nov 15, 1999 at 09:25:25PM +0100, Nils-Erik Svang?rd wrote:
> This was discussed a couple of months ago. The problem is that the data
> for all the languages doesnt fit on the disk, therefore you have to make
> specific boot-images for each language. The proposal long ago was to
> integrate the selection of keyboard and suggest the aproriate language.

Hmm...  What data is needed?

1.  Messages for dbootstrap.  At the moment we have 14 languages. Every
    language is about 32K in trm format what gives us about 470K (too much!).
    But if we compress it's only 160K.

2.  We do not need any keyboard map here (almost everywhere only up and down
    arrows and enter keys are used + English words (like system name etc))

3.  We do need fonts to display those messages.  12 of them are using latin
    characters of some kind plus Russian that uses KOI8-R, plus Japanese that
    uses something quite special :).  LatArCyrHeb covers 13 languages, what
    gives us 4K plus a couple of Ks for acms (that are needed!).  I do not
    know how large Japanese fonts are.

That's all.  This gives 170K without Japanese stuff.  Is it too much?  I heard
there were successful experiments with 2,8M images.  These are certainly
suitable for CD booting.  We must provide multilanguage installation in this
case, though we may want to provide a special image (root disk??) for every
supported language.

--
Mike