Re: Translation of toppler

[Clytie Siddall <clytie@riverland.net.au>]

On 08/06/2006, at 6:13 PM, Bill Allombert wrote:

> On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 02:20:32PM +0930, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> > On 07/06/2006, at 6:32 AM, Bill Allombert wrote:
> >
> > > To check whether your language can be supported:
> > >
> > > The full set of glyph available is at
> > > <http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/misc/font_mask.png>.
> > > While upstream is quite ready to add new glyphs, only a limited
> > > number of them can be added.
> >
> > Vietnamese would require a lot of additional glyphs (mostly combined
> > diacritics), so it looks like we're out of the picture for now.
>
> I am not sure it will be sufficient, but upstream has already added  
> more
> diacritics. The new set of glyphs is available at the same URL:
>
> <http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/misc/font_mask.png>
Unfortunately, we need 134 glyphs. :(

Ours is a tonal language, like Chinese, but written in a Roman  
alphabet. We have 12 vowels, each with six possible tonal states.  
This results in combined diacritics that make Vietnamese a test case  
for Unicode support. Only very large Unicode fonts, or Unicode fonts  
created for Vietnamese, cover our glyph set.

For example, although your font contains the e circumflex character,  
it doesn't contain the five other ways we write that character:

ê	e circumflex
ề	e circumflex and grave
ể	e circumflex and hook above
ễ	e circumflex and tilde
ế	e circumflex and acute
ệ	e circumflex and dot under

Lots of fun for fontographers. ;)

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN