Re: Multilingual Support as in Windows
On Thursday 20 March 2003 11:13, Muhammad Asif wrote:
> I need some clear guidelines towards a bit confusing issue. I need to
> evaluate what kind of support/services are available in Linux as in
> windows xp for devloping and viewing Multilingual applications.
> Such applications need support both at backend and front end. Currently i
> need more to work on fron-end support. What i can understand yet is some
> services like Regional Settings provided by OS like windows can be used to
> format Multilingual data according to a Locale. Similalry OS should be
> capable of storing/retreiving data in Unicode. I need some
> comparison/feature of Linux what kind of support/services it provides to
> develop/view the multilingual apps?
This is a completely off topic tread. I don't know what led you to post this
to Debian User's mailing list. There would have been many better mailing
lists for this subject.
i18n ( internationalization ) support is available in many layers in the the
GNU/Linux world. I have never worked on any i18n project on Windoze, but I am
part of a couple of teams, which have localized some application like KDE
into my language ( farsi ).
Unlike the Windoze world ( Where everyone uses MFC ), in GNU/Linux we have
many many software development toolkits which are used for creating and
writing programs. The most important ones are the X toolkit, Gtk, and Qt .(
Some may argue that Motif is also important, while ceratinly it is still
being used in many Unices, in the GNU/Linux world, because of it's
proprietary license, it's not that much popular ).
All of these toolkits , offer some i18n and l10n support. So programs written
in them can be localized and can have i18n support. Although the level of
support of diffrent languages varies between these toolkits. My experience
shows that Qt has the best i18n support. Qt and Gtk do support Unicode (
utf-8 ). I'm not shure about the X toolkit.
Generaly speaking, please don't use these ' as in windows ' term so much.
GNU/Linux developers don't try to do things ' as in windows '. And,
currently, the level of i18n and l10n support, offered in recent versions of
KDE and Gnome, is far more advanced than the level of support in tha last
version of windoze. Using KDE 3.1, I can change my keyboard layout with just
a single click. I can change the interface of the progarm, without even
restaring my OS. In order to change the interface in windows, you usually
have to recompile the OS, which is M$'s job. And to answer your question, no
you don't need diffrent distros for i18n and l10n support. Most current
distros, have many kind of i18n support, although there are distros, aiming
to providing the best experience for a specific language.
I guess you are from Pakistan, and as far as I know, there are no Ordu
keyboard layouts in XFree86. The first step for i18n is to design a keyboard
layout ( according to the acepted standards in your country ) and put it
into XFree86. After that, if your language uses Unicode encoding, then you
probably won't have problem with i18n in most Qt and Gtk applications.
For localization, someone should translate the program. The best way to do so
is using Portable Object, and therefore, you need a PO editor to start
translating a program. such programs exist, like POEdit, Emacs and KBabel.
Other than that, desktop enviroments, also have guidlines, on how to
translate the desktop enviroment.
There are *many* documents and websites and groups, dedicated to the subject
of l10n and i18n support in GNU/Linux. A google search would have provided
you with far more efficent answers about this subject, than this mailing
list.
> Do we need language specific distribution of linux to acheive above goals
> or like windows we can change settings specific to locale within same
> distribution?
oh c'mon, as in windoze, as in windoze , as in windoze. What's so special
about this OS that when ever I talk GNU/Linux, all my friends use this ' as
in windoze ' term? No offense intended, but.......
Cheers
--
/* Those who do not understand Unix
*are condemned to reinvent it, poorly */
-UNDEAD Evil GNU/Linux
Aryan Ameri
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