Return to BSD News archive
Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA5227 ; Tue, 22 Dec 92 14:00:28 EST Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd:9192 comp.os.linux:19938 Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!ellis!goer From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST) Message-ID: <1992Dec19.173647.12322@midway.uchicago.edu> Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages Sender: news@uchinews.uchicago.edu (News System) Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations References: <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu> <1992Dec18.212323.26882@netcom.com> <1992Dec19.083137.4400@fcom.cc.utah.edu> Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 17:36:47 GMT Lines: 36 terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes: > >If we assume booting to X on a VGA (640x480) as a default, and >additional setup of the X to support alternate resoloutions, then we can >cover nearly all written human languages, with exceptions for Arabic, >Hebrew, and Tamil (and similar languages) which require "connection rules" >to be drawn (not supported in X) or have differing drawing direction (for >which there is only primitive support). Drawing direction is a major minus. Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Ethiopic, etc. all go the "wrong" way. That is, they are written from right to left. Ethiopic doesn't require ligatures, but the others do. It's really a shame that X doesn't handle these scripts, since a sig- nificant portion of the world's population uses the Arabic alphabet. One poster suggested that a basic familiarity with a few scripts would suffice for US engineers, i.e. make them able to code "multinationally." This is true in one sense. But there's hardly any way they can get this education. Where can they go, typically, to find training in how to wordwrap text composed of both Arabic and English. Language mixing is quite common these days, and there are some very specific conventions that are followed when wrapping mixed right-left and left-right lang- uages. I happen to know what they are. I wonder, though, if there is a single US-born engineer online here who knows. My guess is that there isn't. I'd even guess that many of they people who think their engineer- ing multilingual text objects and interfaces don't know. This isn't mean to be a gripe, incidentally. I just want to point out our great cultural isolation, and note that, with this kind of disad- vantage, can we realistically expect to design systems for the world as a whole? -- -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer