On Mon, Jul 11, 2005, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote about "Re: Hebrew Support in Linux": > Hi, > > > 1. Hebrew in a popular general-purpose Linux distribution > > I think that Hebrew support in Linux is quite good these days. There > are some issues (ahhm, Thunderbird/Mozilla/Firefox hebrew text > composition has some issues, and I wish the guys from IBM who wrote it > will take care of it..), but both popular widgets (QT and GTK 2.x) has > excellent hebrew support, and dare I say this - even better then what > MS offers.
This is exactly what I said (please read the entire article I liked to). Hebrew support in invidual applications and widgets is already quite good. But, the problem is integration in a *distribution*. An Israeli user would like Hebrew to be enabled "out-of-the-box" (after perhaps choosing "Hebrew" in one place) without any special configurations. He or she would also like all visible strings, helps, and so on to be in Hebrew. They would like to have a Jewish calendar added to the standard calendar, Hebrew spell-checking in every application that supports spell-checking, and so on. They want all this to happen without issuing dozens of strange commands, "apt-get"ing various additional packages, and so on. They don't want to have to seperately choose "Hebrew" in obscure menus in each separate application. You get the picture. Like I said, distributions like Kazit and Kinneret already did this. But I think that we need something like this based on a complete general-purpose distribution, such as Fedora or Debian, rather than a live-cd or special- purpose distribution. Better yet, we need to work with the distribution makers so that choosing "Hebrew" during the installation of Fedora, Debian or whatever, will bring up a complete Hebrew-supporting system. We're not there yet, despite being closer than ever to this goal. > > 3. Hebrew translation of applications > > I think this is a bit of problematic issue. Most of the more > experiment Linux users (for example) tend to preffer using english > based app and use the widget's thats the application is built in with Again, read the entire Hebrew article... I explicitly mentioned that Hebrew translation should be an *option*, and that users should be able to choose other languages, including English. However, I disagree with you that most users will prefer Hebrew support. Believe it or not, most Israelis I know, even native English speakers (!), prefer Hebrew menus. Of course, if these are done extremely badly then even die-hard Hebrew fans will switch back to English, but there is no inherent reason why the translations have to be bad. They can't be bad if we want Linux to be popular in Israel. > > 4. Hebrew translation of "web applications" (wiki, bug tracking, blog, > > etc.) > > There are few. Word press is available with hebrew, and frankly, I > never had a request for Hebrew localized bugzilla, for example. Wiki > is also available in hebrew if I'm not mistaken. If you install bugzilla out of the box, it doesn't work properly with Hebrew comments because it assumes latin1 encoding by default. It is almost trivial to patch this (use utf8, supported by every browser!), and I've done this on several installations (e.g., ivrix.org.il/bugzilla). But like I said, users should not need to do these "fixes" to support Hebrew (or other languages). And of course, there is no Hebrew translation of bugzilla. Similarly, Web mail software like "squirlmail" reportedly doesn't work very well with Hebrew. Stuff like hypermail and htdig also reportedly have problems. And none of these have Hebrew translation, I believe. Wikimedia used to have serious Hebrew issues, but I believe they are better now. And these are just examples. Again, the situation is better than it was 6 years ago, but it can't be said that it is perfect, or even close to perfect. > > 5. Hebrew OCR > > Thats a tuff one. Most of the algoritms are protected with Patents (I > think Iris has most of them if I'm not mistaken). I haven't tried it > yet, but I don't know how much hard would it be to use Crossover > Office with the IRIS software to do some OCR hebrew. I'm not sure patents are the problem here. The bigger problem that this is a genuinely difficult project. But so was Hebrew spell-checking, and all it took was two dedicated volunteers to make this become a reality. "Crossover Office" and commercial problems are not a solution - it's a copout. > > 7. Voice UI (Hebrew speech generation and speech recognition). > > Even Windows has the same issue. IBM was suppose to sell some > solution, but I haven't heard about it for a long time now.. Again, please read my entire Hebrew article... I didn't say that Windows has a voice UI *now*.. What I said was that one day we may wake up to find that it has one, and that everyone expects Linux to have one too - and on that day we find ourselves 5 years behind and unable to convince anyone to try Linux. Just like when everyone expected WYSIWYG word processors (and didn't use Linux for the lack a word processor in Hebrew), and us "geeks" were still perfecting Hebrew support for TeX. Think of the boy-scout motto: "Be prepared" :-) -- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Jul 11 2005, 4 Tammuz 5765 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Take my advice, I don't use it anyway. http://nadav.harel.org.il | ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
