From: Aiet Kolkhi (aietkolkhi@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 11 2007 - 12:11:20 CDT
Hello Tom,
nice to see you here.
The language kit in question is a very useful package and its author,
Reno Siradze has always been there for Georgian Mac users.
For proper basic Georgian support, it would be nice if the operating
system or the external language package came with the following:
1. The Georgian-QWERTY keyboard layout, which is by far the most
popular keyboard layout used by more than 95% of Georgian users.
- The package in question includes basic Georgian-QWERTY keyboard
layout, but unlike Georgian-QWERTY layouts available on other
operating systems, it does not include Georgian quotation marks, some
important special characters, the Georgian characters added in recent
versions of Unicode (Fi, Yn, Elifi, Turned Gan and Ain) etc.
Here is the description of the QWERTY layout which includes all the
characters mentioned above:
http://www.gakartuleba.org/layouts/index.php
2. Georgian Ergonomic - the new Georgian ergonomic, dvorak-like layout
created by Georgia IT Department, TK-18 Group and other experts.
3. Georgian MESS keyboard layout - Georgian Ministry of Education and
Science Schools layout used in all Georgian schools.
All these layouts come recent versions of Linux distributions and
Microsoft Windows.
4. At least one Georgian scalable typeface, but preferably one
Serif-style, one sans-serif style and one fixed-width courier-style
font. There are some Georgian typefaces that are professionally
hinted, open-source and are easily licensable to Apple Inc. for
Georgian support.
In comparison, the Georgian Language package for OS X in question
contains only one font (Zuzumbo.dfont) which is very nice font but
since it is not an OpenType font or due to some other reasons, is not
sufficient for system-wide display of Georgian texts. As a result,
some Georgian localized software, like Opera Browser, display squares
instead of Georgian text.
5. Proper Georgian locale, which would include regular locale
information about currency, date, time and numbers formats, collation
rules, timezone and other important language and cuntry-specific data.
6. The localization kit UI of operating system.
The main user interface of popular open-source and commercial
operating systems, as well as of popular open-source and commercial
office suits have been localized to Georgian. This includes
open-source titles like Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, and
commercial titles like Microsoft XP, Vista, Office 2007, Opera browser
etc.
As a result, if a popular operating system was to support a language,
I think it should also consider localizing its main UI to Georgian :)
-
Aiet Kolkhi
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 11 2007 - 12:13:47 CDT