more questions about japanese (was Re: [I18n-sig] Re: I18n)
Peter Funk
pf@artcom-gmbh.de
Wed, 9 Feb 2000 09:03:22 +0100 (MET)
Hi!
[Andy Robinson]:
> There is a standard Japanese character set (Japan Industrial Standard
> 0208, or JIS-0208 for short) with 6879 characters, which has been
> more or less unchanged since 1978. They are defined in a logical
> 94x94 space (the 'kuten table'), with some holes in it. This
> character set is commonly encoded in three different ways, all of
> which aim for backward-compatibility with ASCII:
[...]
> All three do not contain null bytes or control characters, so most
> 8-bit-safe software works fine with data in these encodings - you
> might not be able to see Japanese in your English word processor, but
> it will be preserved intact. All three are very widely used, and are
> the de facto encodings we have to deal with.
[...]
> Confused yet? I could go on... I will try to write up some decent
> background documents over the course of this month.
First let me thank you for your insightful elaboration!
And please excuse my ignorance again. But the i18n work I was involved
with in the past was easily handled within a 8 bit clean ISO-8859-1
character space (german, english, french, italian, spanish). So I've
some more questions to the above:
1. I guess: Word processors exists, which are able deal with text files
containing strings in one of the encodings described above, right?
So is it possible to submit a .pot-File as produced by GNU xgettext
to a japanese translator and he/she would be able to fill in
the empty msgstr "" lines with japanese messages?
2. If the resulting .mo-files from 'msgfmt' will be used with a i18n'ed
python application, these strings will go unchanged through several layers
of software just as would normal ASCII-strings. There are
some japanese fonts coming with XFree86 and Linux, but I've never
had look at them. Would it be possible to choose such a font, and
will this show the desired output on a X-server running on Unix/Linux?
3. What about MacOS and WinXX? I guess, these systems will automatically
show up the right characters, if in step 1. the translator has used
a word processor on the same platform?
Regards, Peter
--
Peter Funk, Oldenburger Str.86, D-27777 Ganderkesee, Germany, Fax:+49 4222950260
office: +49 421 20419-0 (ArtCom GmbH, Grazer Str.8, D-28359 Bremen)