From: Ramanan Selvaratnam (rama_at_ukfsn.org)
Date: Tue Dec 23 2003 - 07:40:29 EST
Hi Martin,
On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 11:44, msevior_at_physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> We could really use help in two areas.
>
> The first is straight forward. Translations of our our strings into Indic
> Languages. This should be straight forward an English/Indic speaker. You
> simply need to edit the *.po files and put in the translated UTF-8 codes.
I will answer to the first point as the holiday season for many are
coming fast.
Translation in a useful (ie, coherent with the language in other
related apps) manner is something I have been working on for some time.
As I have finally built bridges across to the Tamil OOo team reusing
many wordlists from there ;) should proove to be immensely helpful.
Also I will make attempts to sync with Gnome-Offcie packages in such a
way AbiWord is useful for a Tamil speaker.
Only issue as there is an urgent need for Gnome official packages to
meet some deadlines personally I would not attend to this for a month or
so. But as more people join our young Gnome translation project (infact
it starts today at Savannah as it is back online) I would be surprised
if someone else picks the Abiword PO files.
Thanks also to Marc Maurer's addional comments. They are noted.
>
> The second place we need help is much harder.
>
> Indic texts do not have a simple relationship between glyph size and
> position.
For this one I have initiated a discussion for GNU.org.in to look into
this as a project. Again you miss out the benefit of being a Gnome
package as I understand they have priorities revolving around Gnome and
KDE. Lets see.
If not I would be more than happy to help Tomas get to grips with few
languages at least.
[...]
> If you know people who speak Tamil
There are apparently 70 million. Yes I do know some :)
> and who would like a free word
> processor that does a good job on their language, please direct them to
> us!
Of course. I will be looking to promote it on liveCDs I am working on to
those ones that seek to liberate Win32. Mugunth (CC'ed) might be
interested.
> We really won't be able to support complex languages with their help.
Yep. I hope your bugzilla will turn out to be useful as oppsed to some systems where some important bugs seem lost forever..
> As to why we're not in gnome-cvs. Alan has already mostly answered that
> question. In addition to his answers, we have a much nicer development
> environment by running our own servers. We can ssh into the machine and
> tweak things to our hearts content. We can easily maintain our own webpage
> etc, etc.
Thanks. I understand. You are not on Sourceforge instead your own
machines. Nothing can beat that.
>
> pango is really designed for GUI elements. It not suitable for all the
> demands of a WYSIWYG Word Processor.
Yes. a good explanation.
> I hope this answers your questions and I haven't got something very wrong.
> We would all love to see Indic language support. I hope we can at least
> get Tamil translation for our strings.
Best regards,
Ramanan
> > On Fri, 19 Dec 2003, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> >
> >> ... how can one (note : I did not say I) be useful with the 'indic'
> >> support that Martin tells me, needs help? What type of help?
> >
> > At a bare minimum run it, type a letter or essay and see if things work
> > all right and if special characters are handled correctly.
> > I vaguely recall that things can be difficult if you dont have all the
> > right fonts. Abiword only uses fonts that it can print properly so that
> > "What you see [onscreen, really] is what you get" when you print it out.
> >
> > Presumabley you have used some indic languages using Gedit, even checking
> > if abiword works as consistantly as it does would be helpful.
> >
> >> Also I understand help is needed with localisig the Gtk2+ interface and
> >> messages. Tell me more.
> >
> > I dont know anything that but I'm hoping my prompt reply will allow you do
> > to something in the meantime. I expect Martin will reply with more detail
> > when the sun rises in Australia.
> >
> > i'm not sure if there is much about Indic in bugzilla but searching the
> > mailing lists archives should also give you ideas. I find a good way to
> > search is to use google and restric it to search only the abisource
> > website and then add the mailing list name and perhaps an additional
> > keyword (indic, tamil, ...) should produce some useful results
> > site:abisource.com abiword-dev
> >
> > (On a less busy day I'd try looking for you but I'm all tired out by
> > Christmas shopping)
> >
> >> Whay are you not in the Gnome CVS to benefit from the GTP (where I am
> >> Tamil coordinator ... why so little is localised is a long story)
> >
> > I suppose abiword could set something up to sync its PO files with a
> > repository in Gnome CVS. Historically Abiword was started as a commercial
> > (but open source) venture and it suited them better to have their own
> > systems for most things and it is still very useful, personally I find the
> > Abiword Bugzilla much more managable than Gnome because it is so much more
> > focused and much smaller.
> > To the best of my knowledge the only reason we dont use Gnome CVS is that
> > historically we have not used Gnome CVS and there has not yet been any
> > huge reason or even desire to switch but if there were good reasons and it
> > was worth effort it may well happen.
> >
> >> All the best,
> >> Ramanan, UK
> >
> > Hope that helps
> >
> > Sincerely
> >
> > Alan Horkan
> > http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
> >
>
>
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