Hi,

Exciting news from the fronts.

Hope everyone can bear with the forwards spree - but I thought at least some *noise* level is necessary to keep the list alive :->

(Which is also to suggest/threaten that, if everyone remains mute, yours truly will resort to more forwards. Folks, avoid unnecessary situations!)

Sajith.

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Subject: [gnu-malayalam-discuss] Localization Newsletter Issue 6, Vol 1 ( 1st September 2004) (full) Date: Wednesday 01 September 2004 18:14 From: Guntupalli Karunakar karunakar@freedomink.org To: gnu-malayalam-discuss@puggy.symonds.net

Localization Newsletter Issue 6, Vol 1 (1st August, 2004) *********************************************************

Editor Speak ------------

The Indic Localization Initiative is at the second level of maturity. The initial phase was marked by the groups releasing LiveCDs and taking the lead in solving a lot of issues related to rendering engines. In the second phase, the groups are looking at implementation issues. At this juncture, the Indic L10n meet planned at the HBCSE assumes enormous importance. For this is planned to be a session where the L10n groups are coming together to share knowledge, inputs and know-how. Together with the increasing interest in the implementation aspects of L10n, the Indic L10n Meet will provide the ideal springboard towards a brainstorming session.

This is also planned to be a session where talks on the proposed Consortium related to Indic L10n would be taken up. For sometime now, there has been a long felt need for a umbrella body which will represent the L10n groups as well as interact with the various stakeholders who form part of the Indic L10n effort.

In this issue, following our standard formats, we take up the TamilPC group as a focus. Do read through the interview and the cover feature for update on their project. We have good news on the OpenOffice.org front too with 2 Indic languages being supported in the build.

As usual, we are looking for volunteers who will provide us with news about Language Workshops, Usability Tests and general L10n news.

Feedback on content, presentation, suggestions for newsletter welcome at <feedback at indlinux dot org> .

News Bits ---------

* KDE Hindi translation review workshop at Sarai. The first KDE Hindi translation review workshop was held at Sarai, Delhi, August 1st-3rd. The workshop sponsored by Sarai, had many participants, with linguistic, Hindi writing and translation experience and Indlinux volunteers, who worked 3 days reviewing KDE Hindi interface. Major applications like Konqueror, Kmail, KDE control center, and other tools were reviewed, and translations changes suggested. Hindi now looks a lot better . Read full report of workshop at http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/ReviewWorkshop

* Mozilla supports Pango upstream. Pango support in Mozilla goes into main source tree, so no more patching. It can be enabled while compiling mozilla with --enable-pango option. For more read http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/html/2004/08/#200408050820 A Bengali sample at http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/index.php?p=93

* Indic Printing in Gnome to work in next release Gnome Printing library now uses Pango to render complex Indic text. This is supported from Gnome versions 2.7 onwards. So next major Gnome release v2.8, scheduled to be released in mid September, will have Indic printing working.

* Hindi , Kannada officially supported in OpenOffice OpenOffice.org's updated Localization Status Page states Hindi and Kannada as being the only two Indian languages to be officially supported (in terms of UI translation) for 1.1.3 and onwards. It also lists other Indian Language teams working towards translating OpenOffice.org and their progress.

* Newer versions of Pango. Owen Taylor, the maintainer of Pango, the Free rendering engine for Gnome, has announced latest versions of Pango.

Latest in the 1.4 (stable) branch is 1.4.1, available from ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.4/ and is intended for use with Gnome 2.4. This includes several bug fixes for Indic languages, submitted by various indic hackers. See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-i18n-list/2004-August/msg00005.html for details.

This version is already included in Debian Sid/unstable, and includes experimental support for Indic language printing for the first time. In a private mail to Mahesh, Owen Taylor clarifies:- If you want printing to work, you need: * Pango-1.5.2 * libgnomeprint-2.7.1 * GtkHTML-3.3.0 (for evolution) * GtkSourceView-1.1.0 (for gedit)

He adds that these are already in the development branch of Fedora Core 3. More testing of the printing functionality is however required.

* Pango Development Version Latest in the pango unstable branch is version 1.5.2, intended for use with Gnome 2.8, is available at ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.5/ Installing this version will overwrite the 1.4 version, if installed.

Those interested in supporting and helping further development of Indic support for pango should subscribe to the GTK-i18n list at http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-i18n-list

* News from Unicode Paul Nelson of Microsoft has offered (on the indic at unicode mailing list) to draft a clarification to the statements on page 249 of the Unicode standards 4.0. There is a general consensus in the community that some people are either mislead or misinterpreting the current language here to mean that the `chill' / `chillaksaram' / `chillus' in Malayalam can be formed without a zero-width joiner at the end.

The consensus on that list (the archives are not accessible in html format) is that chillus in Malayalam should be formed by the sequence ``consonant + chandrakkala + zwj''.

* Free Oriya Fonts now available Hariram Pansari posts on the indic at unicode mailing list that Rajesh Pradhan's Free (as in GPL free) fonts for Oriya are available for download at http://oriya.sarovar.org/download/utkalm.ttf.gz

* Encoding Ya-Phalaa in Bengali Gautam sengupta has posted a proposal to include the Bengali Yaphaala as a separate character. The matter is being discussed. To view the archives of the Unicode mailing lists, follow the instructions at http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/

Team Watch ---------- In this issue we have members of the Tamil team writing about their efforts to localize KDE, Gnome, XFCE, OpenOffice.org, etc., into Tamil. Hariram Aathreya and Jayaradha N speak on Tamil PC effort and Dinesh Nadarajah gives an updated on GNOME and Xfce efforts.

TamilPC team was formed to bring the benefits of open source Tamil computing efforts to the non-tech savvy, non-English speaking Tamil population.

The TEAM - Core team members of the project are * Mr. Sujatha Rangarajan(Writer Sujatha) is an Electronic Engineer and worked in Bharat Electronics, Bangalore. He was involved in many projects of national importance. After retiring he is still active advising corporates. * Ms. Jayaradha, a computer science and engineering graduate - Worked as a software engineer in DishnetDSL for 4 years and joined in Red Hat * Mr. Ma Sivakumar Leather Technology graduate from Anna University. Founder/CEO of BSG LeatherLink * Mr Shanthakumar B.E, MBA (IIM Ahmedabad), working as Branch Manager, ICICI Bank, Neyveli * Ms Ms Leena B.Com working with Sterling Infotech, Chennai. Has designed various CDs, Magazines for Sterling group of Companies. * And a full time coordinator Mr Hariram a software engineer (REC, Bhopal) and worked in Sun Microsystems, USA * PROJECTS:*

Our team has taken a task of translating * KDE,GNOME and fedora Core * Create Keyboard drivers for Tamil transliteration, Oldtypewriter, phonetic, New typewriter layouts * Bring easy to install distribution in Tamil.

Mr Mahesan MCA student developed keyboard driver with amil transliteration, Old typewriter, phonetic, New typewriter layouts layouts using TamilVP developed by Mr Dinesh Natarajan.

OpenOffice.org was the first application that was taken up for localization since there was no Linux based Tamil OpenOffice.org at that point. After solving issues related to compiling from source and font rendering, translation work was started by five people who volunteered during Saturdays. The alpha version of Tamil OpenOffice.org (1.1.0) was released in Nov 2003. OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 in Tamil will be released in the next few days.

* STUDENTS AND COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION:*

In the meanwhile, on the open invitation of Writer Sujatha through his weekly column in Aanantha Vikatan (Tamil magazine) about 45 persons volunteered to translate on Sundays. DishnetDSL Ltd. allotted twenty computers at one of their browsing centers solely for the translation work. Students of MOP Vaishnava College volunteered for one week, translating KDE applications. http://www.zhakanini.org/English/contributors.php

The bulk of the translation was done by students of Loyola College. They spent their vacation in Dec 2003 and again in May 2004 to translate KDE, Red Hat and a part of GNOME. http://www.zhakanini.org/English/team.php

Over 100,000 strings have been translated in the past 6 months. Volunteers have done all the translations till date.

An initial CD release was made in Feb 2004 that included localized version of OpenOffice.org, KDE & the Tamil keyboard driver. The contents of the CD can be accessed from http://www.zhakanini.org/English/democd.php

The work was made possible by the following contributions : * Tamil Virtual University made a grant towards TamilPC development. * Computers and internet connectivity offered by DishnetDSL Ltd. * Computers and internet connectivity offered by BSG LeatherLink Ltd. * Computes contributed by MOP vaishnava college * Cash donations from individuals * Man-hours contributed by volunteers.

Email : Zhakanini@yahoogroups.com

* Status of Tamil Gnome,GTK and XFCE Translations by Dinesh Nadarajah <n_dinesh at yahoo.com>

The Tamil Gnome translation has been going pretty slow for some time now. A large bulk of the effort has been thus far directed towards completing the core libraries (for both GTK and Gnome) and some of the most widely used Gnome applications and utilities. But this was the state of things until recently.

The Loyala College Tamil Translation Team, having completed the KDE Tamil translation, have also started to contribute to the Gnome Translation effort. Many files related to the Gnome Desktop have been translated by these folks.

Students at the Bannari Amman Institute (Tamil Nadu) lead by Vivekananthan Sivashanmugam are also setting up an environment to contribute to the translation effort. N. Jayaradha of has translated the Evolution mail client among many other files. The Gnome 2.8 release due for September 15th 2004 is to going into string freeze (Applications) on August 16th, 2004. API string freeze went into effect in July. The Tamil Gnome Translation team, with the help of all interested volunteers, is hoping to have most of the version 2.8 translations completed before its release.

* Tamil XFCE Translations: For the uninitiated, XFCE is a light weight desktop environment developed using the GTK2 toolkit. XFCE supports all basic features of any desktop, including a panel, a file manager and also a plug-in architecture for third part plug-in developers. XFCE also natively supports Xinerma multi-display technology.

Tamil translation of XFCE was started by Dinesh Nadarajah in 2001, who was joined by V.Venkatramanan, Amjith, and Vijay. The XFCE Tamil translation is pretty complete right now. XFCE Version 4.2 is due to be released later this year as well. XFCE-4.2 string freeze goes into effect on August 15th and is due to be released in November.

(Disclaimer : Many of the names mentioned above are people who have contacted me recently and have contributed. Far too many have contributed at one time or another.)

Related Links Tamil Linux portal - http://www.tamillinux.org/ Tamil Linix group on Yahoogroups - http://www.yahoogroups.com/groups/tamilinix

Help ----

* Contributions for user documentation for Indic Live CD required All languages Indic Live CD - Rangoli will be coming up soon. At present it has boot options for languages - (GNOME) Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Malayalam, Punjabi. KDE - Hindi , Tamil. Xfce - Kannada. We need many howto's/ guides for users to be written, preferably they be in indian languages, and using Unicode. For more on what contributions are needed, checkout http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/RangoliDocs

Feedback --------

Comments, suggestions, criticism, news bits for newsletter can be sent to feedback AT indlinux.org

To recieve newsletter regularly subscribe to our News list - http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/indlinux-news

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