Re: [A12n-Collab] "Microsoft to launch applications in three Nigerian languages"

[Andrew Cunningham <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Trond Trosterud wrote:
> Andrew Cunningham kirjoitti 10. apr. 2008 kello 04.29:
> > interesting for what it doesn't say as much as what it does say.
> > Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo only have input locales in Windows Vista
> Well, everything is better than nothing.
>
> My wishlist would have been ordered this way:
>
> 1. input locales
> 2. spellchecker
> 3. GUI translation
> 4. More advanced language tools (grammar checker, thesaurus, 
> translation, etc)

You forgot a couple of important steps


Your one becomes my 1a:

1a. input locale
1b. keyboard layouts or IME
1c. fonts (including UI fonts)
1d. font rendering / text layout


Although vista has 1a, 1c and 1d, it is missing 1b

It supports Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo, can localise into them, can display 
them, but can't type in them.
What i tried to say, but may not have said clearly is that there are 
defined input locales for these languages, but NO keyboard layouts.
If the end user has the knowledge and skill you can create a keyboard 
layout and assign it to that input locale. Something we're doing here 
internally.
Never did she the logic in creating Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo input 
locales, but assigning the US English keyboard layout tot hose input 
locales by default and not providing keyboard layouts appropriate to the 
language

Spell checkers are going to be interesting and possibly input specific 
issue.
The Vietnamese experience is an interesting illustration of what will 
happen with Yoruba.
Already with Yoruba there are a number of keyboard layouts using 
different technologies. each allows you to type in Yoruba, but each 
keyboard layout may give you different unicode character sequences for 
the same character.
This impacts on spellcheckers.

For instance in Microsoft's proofing tools for Office, there is a 
Vietnamese spell checker. its been designed to work with Microsoft's 
Vietnamese keyboard layout which produces an odd mix of precomposed and 
combining characters.
Microsoft's spellchecker follows this system

People who use a non-microsoft keyboard layout will be typing fully 
precomposed characters. Many of the words in the text will appear to the 
spell checker as misspelled even if it is correct because it will not 
match the character sequences in the spell checker.
Not sure if this has been improved in more recent applications, but has 
been a long standing issue. Similar issues will exist for other 
diacritic heavy languages.

The Win32 keyboard model isn't overly flexible.


Andrew
--
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