Re: Sinhala GNU/Linux

On Sun, 28 Nov 2004 22:26:48 +0600, Donald Gaminitillake <Donald Gaminitillake> wrote:
>
> I know you all are busy with IITC.

Thanks for the understanding. :-)

First, I am very keen to hear your comments about the attached screenshot.

> Without a proper character allocation table this conferance will not be
> productive nor implemented.
>
> Unless you change the constitution of Sri Lanka to work in English!!!!!

I think, once we figure out the exact technical issues, this won't be a problem.

> How do you write the word "dumriya' using this SLS1134
>
> "DU" is missing

0DAF 0DD4 0DB8 0DCA 0DBB 0DD2 0DBA
> You cannot have *hidden* characters all have to be in unicode for
> implementation. SLS 1134

Please see the attached screenshot. We didn't have a problem with hidden characters for the GNU/Linux implementation. Are there any *technical* reasons on other platforms.

BTW, I haven't added all the glyphs to the font, notably "repaya", but they will be rendered with a repaya when it's present in the font. The character for "ddh" in "buddha" is also yet to come.

> Yes my system do have an individual location for each sinhala character

In that case, we may have to get a big range beyond 65536, like Chinese.

> With my system everything will sort in correct order. irrespective to the OS

This I understand now, because of the presense of all the characters, including the modified ones.

> Computer is not just writing documents it is tool

Of course, it is not!

> I am for Linux and Unix to be implement in Sri Lanka Mac is far better than
> Microsoft and closer to UNIX

And I believe that new Mac OS/X is BSD Unix.

> > You read my mails in Linux because we all use the same unicode character
> > allocation
>
> BUT for Sinhala and Tamil this is not the case. SLS 1134 does not contain
> all the characters in Sinhla language

We have been using Sinhala in our mails and haven't had problems. Interoperability has been good between GNU/Linux and Windows (they say ;-)).

> > "considered shorthand to hal kireema"
>
> Whether this is short hand or not -- this is not the problem of engineers
> WE got to provide all the options to the users.
> We cannot decide for users what to use and what not to use.
> OUR duty is to protect the culture.

Agreed. In more "Unixish" terms, this is called "providing a mechanisim and not policy". And as for my understanding, the present standard and the implementations does provide mechanisms for everything the users want.

> You have not touched on SMS , voice to text , OCR etc

Voice to text and OCR have been looked at, but not SMS.

        Anuradha

-- 

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