Status

                 Please check the status page on work being done around Gnome

Description

“The GNOME Project is an effort to create a complete, free and easy-to-use desktop environment for users, and a powerful application development framework for software developers.

 GNOME is Free Software and part of the GNU project, dedicated to giving users and developers the ultimate level of control over their desktops, their software, and their data.”

Interest for the KhmerOS Initiative

Gnome seems to be a very interesting user interface for this project for several reasons:

•       It is quite complete and well maintained.

•       There could be support from Spanish colleagues

•       It has quite a number of satellite applications that work quite well. Getting support for Gnome implicates getting support also for all these applications (Evolution, Gimp, Alsa, Totem…) 

Drawbacks

·         Gnome cannot yet print in Khmer or any other Indic languages.

Other options:

·         KDE

Language support

Two modules give language support to Gnome and related applications, Pango and Gnome-print. Pango takes care of Layout and rendering, and Gnome-print (as the name indicates) takes care of printing.

At the beginning of this project, Pango supported a number of Indic languages through its “indic module”. Gnome-print did not handle well any indic language. More information on both of them below. Sayamindu Dasgupta, an active player in Gnome regarding indic languages comments on Jan 3 2004 that  “a major advantage that GNOME had was the support for Indic languages. QT 3.2 has support for rendering Indic scripts. However, the input of Indic scripts seems to be somewhat wierd in QT (I was testing QT 3.3.0b1). In the GNOME world, GTK-IM modules are really useful in some cases (I helped someone implement a Bengali desktop system which had to be used over VNC - and GTK-IM proved to be the most hassle free method of handling the input). On the other hand, gnome-print cannot print Indic languages, and that is turning out to be a really bad show stopper - I was testing the KDE 3.2 printing system yesterday, and it printed all the Indic stuff properly."

Translation

Gnome has been translated to a good number of languages, including some indic languages. The translation work is more or less well organized, with its mailing lists, translation tools, status pages and help pages.

Translation is coordinated by a Language Coordinator for each language.

What needs to be translated: Christian says For full GNOME support, everything on the "developer-libs" and "desktop" sections of the translation status pages  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/) needs to be translated. However, the most visible stuff is probably libgnomeui, libgnome, gtk+, gnome-desktop, nome-panel, gnome-control-center, gnome-mime-data, nautilus, gedit, yelp, gdm2, metacity, gnome-vfs, glib, and the rest of the gnome-* ones. I'd start with those, and then move on to the rest.

Translating the core of Gnome involves translating the following numbers of strings:

Other Applications in the Gnome environment have the following number of strings:

Pages of documentation to be translated:

Pango 

Description                                                                                 

“The goal of the Pango project is to provide an open-source framework for the layout and rendering of internationalized text. Pango is an offshoot of the GTK+ and GNOME projects, and the initial focus is operation in those environments, however there is nothing fundamentally GTK+ or GNOME specific about Pango. Pango uses Unicode for all of its encoding, and will eventually support output in all the worlds major languages.

Pango-1.2 has been released and is available for download from ftp.gtk.org. Notable changes in Pango-1.2 as compared to Pango-1.0 are:

·         Pango now uses the fontconfig and Xft2 libraries as the preferred method of locating and rendering fonts on Linux and Unix.

·         Support for OpenType Indic fonts has been added based on the code from the ICU library.

·         New shapers for Hangul and Thai using Xft have been added.

·         The Win32 backend now uses Uniscribe for layout when available

The reference documentation for Pango is included in the Pango tarball and also available online on developer.gnome.org.”

Pango Gives language support to:

·        Gnome

·        Evolution (e-mail, agenda)

·        Mozilla (through a special build)

·        Gimp (Image Processor)

·        Alsa (Audio)

·        Totem (Video)

·        Many other Gnome-related applications

The lack of support for Khmer in Pango has been reported as a bug. The Pango maintainer is Owen Taylor, he says that having public domain OpenType fonts is a prerequisite.

Gnome-print

Description

“gnome-print is a C-based API that implements the Postscript imaging model. It is an actively developed project, and it is being used by various GNOME applications. There are two extensions to the Postscript imaging model supported by gnome-print: Alpha channel support and anti-aliasing. gnome-print includes a rasterizing engine that transforms the requests into bitmaps for native drivers. Various drivers are provided underneath this API, for instance, the current version of GNOME print ships with:

·         Postscript driver.

·         PDF driver.

·         On screen preview driver.

·         Metafile driver used mostly for compound documents.

·         Generic bitmap driver

gnome-print also offers other features for GNOME applications (if you want to use GNOME features):

·         A Gtk+ based printer dialog box that can be customized by apps.

·         A consisten print preview system that renders the commands sent previously.

The current limitations of gnome-print are:

·         The lack of a ditherer between the rasterizing engine and the actual printer driver backend.

·         Lack of color management profiles.

This means that only black and white show up correctly in the output. Incorporating a ditherer should be simple. Miguel has been trying to get any kind of ditherer in place so we can use something better than plain black and white in the HP PCL driver (and other native drivers).

The direction in which we want to move gnome-print in the future include:

·         Incorporation of the 100+ native printer drivers from IBM.

·         At GNOME 2.0 time, the dependency on linking with Gtk+ will be gone, as the base GtkObject object is moved into Glib (GObject).”

It is unclear when or how Gnome-print will offer Indic language support.

Page Last Updated: Friday, 22 October 2004

For any comments on the web, please contact the wembaster of this domain