DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: New Language Poll



I discovered that the polling software allows only one choice, so I've done this second attempt.

Please Click on the first language you come to that you can read. The languages are listed above in reverse order (There are more Chinese speakers/readers than any other language).  Answering the first one you come to will help us capture the range of language-ability we are reaching.

I've got this notion of creating an 8-bit console font set that will cover the languages spoken by about 45% of people worldwide.  

I've been researching character sets for the top 50% of languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Bengali.  So far, my research suggests that Hindi and Bengali are the hardest to cover in the *nix world.

We could _almost_ squeeze all the needed accent characters into the top 128 characters of a 255 character font.  Such a font could help with internationalizing text-based applications.

Toward the end of producing such a font, I've uploaded a new application "nafe-0.1.exe.tar.gz" for creating console fonts.  I'm going to be working on producing the glyphs needed.  The other issues will be:

- order of the glyphs in the font for easiest use; and

- how to do input for such a font, perhaps a simple input tool.  I haven't thought this one out yet and welcome imput from others.

I'd be interested in discussing this with anyone who is familiar with romanization of non-English languages.
I just recieved a back channel message from a user asking, in effect, "What, no French?"

1. The list of languages is based on a statistical analysis of the number of speakers world-wide.  Cover those languages and you've done the best that one can do for the least effort.

2. Most, if not all, of French is already covered.

3. My suggestion is only to provide a tool, not to load the developers with extra work.  Over time we _users_ can supply the text that can be dropped into the scripts and code.  That seems to be the philosophy around here.

4. I went looking for the font files for an example I could modify.  Either it's the usual user problem or I found a tool for the wrong kind of font.  Could someone clarify this for me?
Quote (newby @ Feb. 28 2008,07:39)
4. I went looking for the font files for an example I could modify.  Either it's the usual user problem or I found a tool for the wrong kind of font.  Could someone clarify this for me?

Ah, Hah!

Clarified it for myself: found "bdfedit" on the net.  Uploaded a tarball to [EMAIL=extentions@dslextreme.org...]extentions@dslextreme.org...[/EMAIL]
Without being picky, and at the risk of being thought to be contentious, could you split "English" into "English US" and "English UK"?
Quote (jaygeedsl @ Mar. 04 2008,17:49)
Without being picky, and at the risk of being thought to be contentious, could you split "English" into "English US" and "English UK"?

Interesting question.  Is there a difference in fonts between US and British English?

We Yanks can generally understand your English and vice-versa.  A Hindi, Bengala or Bejinghua reader would not have a clue (unless they were bilingual in English).

I'm looking at the opportunity for DSL to grow and spread around the globe, especially in areas where our cast-off hardware can still be made useful.  To do that, we need a font that has most of the accent marks used by 40% of people world-wide.  I'm looking at this in terms of providing the tool for others to use.

This is a hack that will take me a while.
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