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-   -   OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension (https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=12465)

RogerS 2007-11-29 15:51
OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension
 
Quote:
There probably aren't many visitors to the itT site that need to look up words in Khmer, Thai, Burmese or Lao. Especially since you can't view Unicoded web-pages in those languages on a Nokia Internet Tablet. (Drat!)

But as I've noted my adventures in programming a Firefox extension here, I will point to my blog at the Khmer Software Initiative site, khmeros.info.

There, Click SEAlang beta 0.6.8 is officially announced. (Anyone can download it from SEAlang.net/download/.)

Without the work done to establish a Unicode version of Khmer, without the beautiful Khmer Unicode fonts, without the evangelizing of standards and open software in Khmer, without the literally millions of "messages" translated to localize Firefox (Mekhala), Thunderbird (Moyura), OpenOffice and openSUSE for Khmer users, all performed by Khmer Software Initiative, there would be no use at all for the dictionary extension I've worked on.

So I am glad to see today that KhmerOS has been selected as one of the nine finalists worldwide in the Stockholm Challenge (one of the two finalists in the economic development category). Recognition for this work is made by the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), which promotes innovation and advancement in the acronymic areas of K4D (Knowledge for Development) and ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Congratulations to the developers at KhmerOS! You've done great work!
Read the full article.

kingka 2007-11-29 15:55
Re: OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension
 
is there support for east asian languages? chinese korean japanese

RogerS 2007-11-29 16:00
Re: OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension
 
See the Maemo CJK page at

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/maemocjk/

I myself think it's time Nokia supported all Unicode in the internet tablet. The web isn't displayed in just Western languages after all.

baksiidaa 2007-11-29 23:07
Re: OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension
 
I actually do read Thai and Lao, so I appreciate your posts about SE Asian languages.
Quote:
Especially since you can't view Unicoded web-pages in those languages on a Nokia Internet Tablet.
I may be confused, but I'm pretty sure I do have full unicode support on my N800. I just created the folder .fonts in the user root and copied a unicode font file into it. The browser handles the complex text positioning just fine.

RogerS 2007-12-07 16:14
Re: OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by baksiidaa (Post 102228)
I'm pretty sure I do have full unicode support on my N800. I just created the folder .fonts in the user root and copied a unicode font file into it. The browser handles the complex text positioning just fine.
This is absolutely news to me.

I don't read Thai, but computing began in Thai far in advance of Khmer. That possibly accounts for the difference (for instance, you can do things in Windows XP in Thai in all kinds of apps that can't handle Khmer).

Or it could be the new OS -- what version are you running?

I'll have to run a few more checks and report back. Thanks for the heads-up!

Roger

PS: You should be able to use Click SEAlang with no hitches to look up Thai and Lao words, but there's no Lao corpus for context examples at SEAlang.net.

Added later:

In Khmer, a word that is pronounced with /k/+/r/ is entered "k" + coeng + "r", and it appears on-screen as rk (because /r/ as the second consonant sound appears in front of and below the first consonant). In legacy Khmer fonts, a user would enter some key other than "r" to get that subscript "r" and enter it before the "k", and that would cause it to display in the correct written order.

Khmer Unicode has only a single code point for each consonant and depends on the rendering engine to pick the appropriate shape and location for "r".

But I'm not clear that Thai Unicode is the same. Can you advise?

Thx

RogerS 2007-12-07 19:24
Re: OT: Click SEAlang dictionary extension
 
Doug Cooper at SEAlang answered some questions about this, which I will take the liberty of quoting here:
There are some very minor rendering problems for Thai, mainly having to do with proper positioning of tone marks and vowels that might have to be shifted up or left slightly.

The canonical example for ordering is "ek" (entry) vs. "ke" (sound). The vowel appears before the consonant for all Indic-derived SEA scripts, but is entered after the consonant for Burmese and Khmer.

Khmer and Burmese are unusual (in Western terms) because the interchange standard requires complex rendering in order to be comprehensible.

In contrast, English and Thai can be shown reasonably (albeit with occasional awkward character positioning) with purely bitmapped glyphs.
It sounds to me like Thai is a lucky language from a Unicode-hobbled Internet Tablet perspective -- no special support, but no special support needed.

That said, I'll look deeper over the weekend.

Roger


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