Khmer Software Initiative

A very nice article at AsiaMedia about: Cambodia pledges free Khmer software by 2006 ...and if you understand German you can read the German remake of it here.

The Linux Magazine wrote a small article about KhmerOS !

From Chile to Cambodia ... with some help from South Africa

Cambodians have access to Khmer-language email software for the first time

New intellectual property law forces Cambodians to start developing their own Khmer-language software

“OpenI18N is a workgroup of the Free Standards Group with the goal to propose and coordinate any techniques, conventions, guidelines and activities within the open-source community. The scope of OpenI18N is focused on software/application portability and interoperability in the international context. This workgroup aims to provide a common open-source environment where applications can be executed and behave correctly worldwide, with different scripts, cultures and languages.” ICU is considered part of the OpenI18n project.

Usually, programs are written and documented in English, and use English at execution time for interacting with users. This is true not only from within GNU, but also in a great deal of commercial and free software. Using a common language is quite handy for communication between developers, maintainers and users from all countries. On the other hand, most people are less comfortable with English than with their own native language, and would rather be using their mother tongue for day to day's work, as far as possible.

The XFree86 Project, Inc is the organization which produces XFree86™, a freely redistributeable open-source implementation of X11 or the X Window System. XFree86 runs primarily on UNIX® and UNIX-like operating systems such as Linux, all of the BSD variants, Sun Solaris x86, Mac OS X (via Darwin), as well as other platforms like OS/2 and Cygwin.

FreeType 2 is a software font engine that is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images). It can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, and many other products as well.. Note that FreeType 2 is a font service and doesn't provide APIs to perform higher-level features, like text layout or graphics processing (e.g. colored text rendering, "hollowing", etc..).

Khmer UFT-8 Unicode can be compressed to 1-byte-per-character.