On Sat, 3 Nov 2001, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe wrote:
--- Keyur Shroff keyur@konark.ncst.ernet.in wrote about Indix ...
How does this thing compare with the GNU efforts for i18n, esp Pango? Can somebody explain why one should be preferred over the other? My gut-feeling is that it would be a better invested of efforts if people worked with the GNU i18n efforts rather than create new systems ...
I don't want to start any flame war on this group. But my personal feeling is that Indian people are far behind in internationalization/localization technology than rest of the world because we always wait for someone who can provide solution for us. Here a good example would be of Japanese/Chinese people who modified and wrote their own X Window system (cxwin) and forced other people to incorporate their changes in new releases of original X Window system.
I contacted Open Group about the changes that we made in X Window system. But they replied that OpenType font support in X Window system is not in their current scope. So what should we do? Should we wait until someone decide to provide that support?
As far as GNU i18n efforts are concerned, Pango has support for OpenType font but I suspect they have include Indic scripts also. We contacted Owen Taylor (writer of Pango) and we'll also provide support to Pango library. We also contacted many people on gtk-i18n and XFree86-i18n list and they also agreed on the point that good solution for Indic scripts can not be provided without OpenType font support.
Pango is a very good library and it has capability to render most of the languages in this world. But client program has to use this library and hence modification is required in applications. Isn't it better to provide some solution so that you can use your applications without any modification? As far as I know, before IndiX release there was no terminal-emulator program available with Unicode support that can render Indic scripts _properly_. Now you can even use your favourite Linux application/utilities like lynx, pine, vim, etc. without modifying them.
However we don't force anyone to use this system. This is what we have contributed to Open source softwares. It is up to the user which system to use. Don't we have two Desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) on Linux?
Regards, Keyur