newby
Group: Members
Posts: 171
Joined: June 2006 |
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Posted: Feb. 09 2008,19:02 |
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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.
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