Re: Sinhala GNU/Linux

On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 09:23:25 +0600, Donald Gaminitillake <Donald Gaminitillake> wrote:
>
> Thank you for the links and introducing my site to your friends.

Nice to meet you! I am CCing Harshula, who is our standards expert.

> The problem I find is the "TEXT" data will not be compatible with other
> Operating Systems.

Hmmm.... Well, I don't know how far Microsoft have made progress along this, but those who tested the Sinhala translation of our site (http://test.linux.lk) reported it to be perfect from MS windows. Fortunately, I don't use Windows at all... ;-)

> This is simply because the SLS 1134 - unicode do not have all the sinhala
> characters in its matrix.

Well, I thought of it to be a problem when I started on localization of GNU/Linux some time back, but later realized that it is not a problem, but rather simplifies matters, and more importantly, the language (which we all love most and don't want to be destroyed in any way) doesn't loose anything. Particularly, representing yansaya, rakaaraansaya, bandi-akuru and repaya (and even the character ddh, as in "visuddhi margaya") have never been a problem for us. Hope you saw this screenshot:

http://www.linux.lk/~anuradha/sinhala/screenshots/0.1-0.2/bendi-akuru.png

And in my humble opinion (please correct me if I am wrong), Unicode has simplified sorting.

> This is the only issue I have.

I am genuinly interested in understanding your views. However, as of now, I don't see a problem in not having seperate characters.

On the other hand, I don't think it is practical to have every form of a character (say "ki", "kii", "ke", "kee" etc) a seperate code.

> We all got to join and make voice to include all individual characters into
> the SLS 1134.

Please let me understand the exact issue, and if we are convinced about the issue. Perhaps, we are missing something.

> Just beause a keyboard having a key cap character locations will not image
> the language without the OS support
> If any OS supports a particular language you can use any keyboard to access it.
> Key caps are just a guide line for the humans.

I understand if there is a one to one relationship between keystrokes and characters, some issues will be simplified. But there are yet other issues - notably sorting - which is extremely straightforward with the present Unicode standard.

Harshula has created some keymaps for the present standard, and seems to work great for me.

Looking forward to hear from you.

        Anuradha

-- 

http://www.linux.lk/~anuradha/
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html