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Re: An article from freshmeat
On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Oren Held wrote:
> Hello List
>
> Hmm... I didn't really like this article, but maybe it's just me.
> It's about localization problems in Linux.
>
> http://freshmeat.net/news/2000/10/21/972187199.html
The article raises three problems. I wish to add some comments about those
three.
1. locales settings
Mandrake has done a good job here. Locales are avalalbe for many
languages. Furthermore, setting your locale environment varibles is done
right by the shell login scripts. The locale is easily configurable on a
system-wise and per-user basis.
Of course the installer makes the whole process quite automatic, but
chaging it is quite easy.
2. Keyboard layout
I wish to elaborate on the local angle.
For some strange reason a bogus Hebrew keyboard layout has been wondering
in most cnfig files (I think it is still present in the current gnome
distibution). The only thing that can be done is to bug maintainers until
this is fixed.
Furthermore, the other problem mentioned, that the allowed input
characters depend on the locale, is indeed a serious limitation of XFree
(or is it X11?).
An ugly workaround is the "8bit" layout I mention in
http://www.iglu.org.il/faq/cache/85.html . But it breaks on many occasions
as well.
3. context in gettext
I must agree here. This is a serious problem. At the moment too many
translations are not recomended, until there is enogh support for Hebrew
in graphics toolkits (try gtk 1.3 everybody ;), because visual-Hebrew
translations are inherently problematic anyway.
But hey, problems are for people to solve. If internationalization would
have been a simple technical thing, who would have bothered doing it? ;)
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:tzafrir@technion.ac.il
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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