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Other Interesting projects
OpenI18N (before Li18nux)
Description
“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. It is also
interesting to include Locale data inside this project, as their
common repository will be used by many applications.
Gettext
Description
“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.
Many would simply love seeing their computer screen showing
a lot less of English, and far more of their own language.
GNU `gettext' is
an important step for the GNU Translation Project, as it is an asset
on which we may build many other steps. This package offers to
programmers, translators, and even users, a well integrated set of
tools and documentation. Specifically, the GNU `gettext' utilities
are a set of tools that provides a framework to help other GNU
packages produce multi-lingual messages. These tools include a set
of conventions about how programs should be written to support
message catalogs, a directory and file naming organization for the
message catalogs themselves, a runtime library supporting the
retrieval of translated messages, and a few stand-alone programs to
massage in various ways the sets of translatable strings, or already
translated strings. A special
GNU Emacs
mode also helps interested parties in preparing these sets, or
bringing them up to date.
Online Manual is
available at
www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/
“
Description
“The
XFree86 Project, Inc
is the organisation which produces XFree86™, a
freely redistributable 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.
XFree86, provides a client/server interface between display hardware
(the mouse, keyboard, and video displays) and the desktop
environment while also providing both the windowing infrastructure
and a standardized application interface (API). XFree86 is
platform-independent, network-transparent and extensible.
Discussions about internationalisation and localisation support in
XFree86 examples are encoding and keyboard handling.”
Freetype
Description
“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..).
However, it greatly simplifies these tasks by providing a simple,
easy to use and uniform interface to access the content of font
files.
FreeType 2 is
released under two open-source licenses: our own BSD-like
FreeType License
and the
GPL.
It can thus be used by any kind of projects, be they proprietary or
not.”
Compression of Unicode text:
Khmer
UFT-8 Unicode can be compressed to 1-byte-per-character
The Indian GNU/Linux Project
Description
“The
goal of this project is to create a Linux distribution that supports
Indian Languages from a GUI/Application level as well as Kernel
level.¨
Description
“We
create open-source infrastructural code, and provide technical
documentation on Indian language computing issues. Our mailing lists
provide forums where Indian language computing can be discussed.
Indian
language computing has yet to make a impact on the vast majority of
the people living in the Indian subcontinent. There appear to be
seven major factors hindering the adoption of computing in the
subcontinent — these are examined in greater detail in our
"Design
Axes"
paper.
This
SourceForge.Net project is attempting to address the factors that
are adversely impacting the use of open-source for building Indian
language computing infrastructure.
We
intend to serve the open-source community in three major ways:
·
by promoting developer education by creating a
freely accessible, “open-source”
Handbook covering Indian language
computing.
·
by
writing open-source software tools for real-world Indian language
computing needs. Our development projects are open to all, and a few
have applicability to more areas than just "Indic" computing.
·
and finally, by offering
mailing lists on which issues related to
Indian language software and indian language standards can be
discussed. “
Graphite
Description
“Graphite is a
project under development within SIL’s
Non-Roman Script Initiative
and Language Software Development groups to provide
rendering
capabilities for
complex non-Roman writing systems
on the Windows platform. (Work began in 1997 under the code name
WinRend.) Graphite can be used to create "smart
fonts"
capable of displaying writing systems with various
complex behaviors.
With respect to the
Text Encoding Model,
Graphite handles the "Rendering" aspect of writing system
implementation.
Graphite is intended
to serve as the principal non-Roman renderer for the
FieldWorks
package, the new generation of linguistic and translation tools
under development within SIL. We also want to make the Graphite
library available to any software developer who is working to
develop multilingual text processing applications.
Contact
graphite_nrsi@sil.org
with inquiries.” Project manager is Sharon_Correll@sil.org
Graphite could have been interesting for this project if it was not
the case that now Mozilla get support from Microsoft Uniscribe
directly, so normal OpenType fonts can be used. Also, the
possibility of using Pango in Linux Mozilla makes the use of this
project unnecessary for Khmer... unless no support for printing is
available, in which case Graphite could be an option for Mozilla
support.
SILA Project (Graphite in Mozilla)
Description
SILA is a
Mozilla development effort supported by
UNESCO and
SIL International. It is a key component
of a joint project between UNESCO and SIL being carried out within
the framework of UNESCO's
Initiative B@bel (http://webworld.unesco.org/imld/babel_en.html)
and
SIL's Non-Roman Script Initiative (http://scripts.sil.org). Initiative
B@bel seeks to provide wider more equitable access to information
content and services on the Internet for all users, (particularly
developing countries and those in transition) by promoting
linguistic diversity in cyberspace and using information and
communication technologies (ICTs), to protect and preserve
endangered languages. The development of technologies which enable
minority language communities to publish on the Internet is a
substantial contribution to this effort. Many language communities
in the world today are not able to participate in the information
age because their language cannot be implemented on today's computer
systems. This causes a "digital divide". The goal of this project is
to help eliminate this divide by designing and producing freely
available software for these language communities. To learn more
about this project please see
http://www.sil.org/sil/news/2003/unesco.htm.
See comment in Graphite project.
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