Subject: Re: Other natural languages
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 17:03:44 CST
--- Savant shanti <info2mein@yahoo.com> wrote: >
Hello Developers,
> I went through the list of available languages in
> AbiWord but couldn't find my language. I find
> AbiWord
> to be an excellent word processor and want to
> include
> my language support into it.
> Please tell me how to start with it. Also I see
> in
> "Set Language" options 'Hindi' as one of the
> language
> but when I choose that an error comes up 'Some
> dictionary cannot be opened'.
> Please reply soon.
I'm one of the AbiWord "language guys" so I'll try to
help. There's a few places where languages are
integrated into AbiWord. The most basic place is the
"document language" which usually comes from your
computer's locale setting but can be overriden for any
section of a document by the "Set Language" option.
The error you see is because Abi does on-the-fly
spellchecking but we have no spellchecking dictionary.
If somebody can tell us where to find one we will
surely use it. Or anybody can create their own if
they know how to do so for ispell or pspell, both of
which Abi can use. Separate from Abi itself, you will
need a keymap or input method for your language. For
Hindi I know Windows 2000 and up come with such
keymaps and Abi worked with them some months back.
You will also need fonts for your language and you
will need to know how to set up your OS for these
fonts. Windows 2000 and up also come with Hindi fonts
but on *nix I bet this is not easy. The final thing
I can think of is the ability to render your
language's script system. There are four major
classes of these: Western, BiDi, CJK, and complex
script. Abi's Western script support (English etc)
is very good. Our CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean)
support is quite good but we have issues from time to
time. Our BiDi (Hebrew, Arabic, etc) support is being
actively worked on by a small dedicated group but I
believe Hebrew works better than Arabic. Our complex
script support (Thai, Hindi, Indic languages) is not
very good. We don't have anybody working on this as
far as I know but some of the BiDi work is probably
quite useful in this regard. We also intend to/hope
to make use of PanGo at some point after Abi 1.0 which
should do wonders for complex scripts but that's not
any time soon.
Hope this helps. I've probably left some things out.
What language are you interested in adding?
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net
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