I18n

Internationalisation (or localisation) touches:

• Input - how a user writes a text
• Presentation (or output) - how a text is presented to the user
• Aids - writing aids and processing mechanisms with and without user interaction
• Localisation of user interface

Related information

Input method standards and implementations:

• X11 Input Method (XIM) system (old documentation)
• Internet/Intranet Input Method Framework (IIIMF) is a new input management system from the same people who brought you XIM (project information)
• UIM is an embeddable C library providing input methods (project page)
• kinput2 is a Japanese input server for XIM (homepage)
• GNU Emacs has long had extensive input support in its LEIM library. (See info docs within emacs if you have it on your system.) On the pro side it's GPL'd already and more complete than other implementations; on the con side it's mostly in elisp and also may be built around an odd encoding ("Emacs-MULE"), except possibly in the unicode-2 branch.

Output:

• vertical text layout
• bidi text layout
• opentype support
• CSS3 Text Module

Requirements

Output:

• NSTextView
• Typesetters
• Opentype supports
• Word hyphenation
• Word segmentation

Input:

• NSTextInput protocol
• NSInputManager

Aid:

• Spell-checking NSSpellChecker

Status

I'm trying to form a gnustep-i18n team and list all relevant subjects. If you are experienced in this field, please help.

FIXME

• what input method(s) GNUstep currently uses and for what backend? How?
  • Correct me if I were wrong. Currently we use XIM that only available in back-x11. Many input systems, eg. IIIMF, kinput2 have their own XIM bridges. Do we have those pop-up helpers with XIM yet?
• what output method(s) is used? How? Why?
• what aids are available? how they are backed? (for example, what spellchecking backend is used and how
  • The spellchecker uses libaspell for its backend
  • aspell has dictionaries for at least these languages - af, br, ca, cs, cy, da, de, el, en, eo, es, fo, fr, ga, he, hr, is, it, nl, no, pl, pt, ro, ru, sk, sl, sv, uk (list taken from gentoo portage)
  • some languages are unsupported by aspell.
  • In the case where the currently selected NSLanguage doesn't have a dictionary available, an error dialog will show, telling you that the dictionary isn't available. It won't allow you to spell check with another dictionary until you manually open the spell check panel, and select a different dictionary. I mention this becuase its easy to get the impression that the spellchecker is broken if your NSLanguage is for example set to Thai.
  • Continuous spellchecking isn't implemented

Comments

http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/uim is obsolte. See http://uim.freedesktop.org/wiki/ wmuimis a dockapp which is instead of uim-helper-toolbar-gtk SCIM (Smart Common Input Method) is a one of major input methods.

Both uim and scim have more Japanese engines than kinput2 and iiimf.