[squeak-dev] The state of Squeak I18n support: let's improve it

Katerina Barone-Adesi katerinab at gmail.com
Wed Sep 3 22:36:35 UTC 2008


> We fixed many of these shortcomings in the OLPC Linux VM and image. Keyboard
> input works with dead keys, compose keys, and XIM. Clipboard works with
> unicode, formatted/rich text and images (this builds on the Sophie guys'
> work). There is rendering of various text scripts via Pango, including e.g.
> Devanagari with correct glyph shaping (Nepal is one of the pilot countries).



I've tried the OLPC Squeak image, using the instructions at
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Etoys#Method_1_.28Easiest.29_-_Use_Squeakland_installation_and_the_OLPC_image
and the link to what it says is the newest image:
http://etoys.laptop.org/src/etoys-image-and-pr.zip .  The results were
mixed.

Successes:
- Accented Latin characters work immediately.
- Japanese support partially works: switching to Japanese, fonts are
successfully loaded, and Japanese is displayed.

Problems:
- Deadkeys don't work.
- Anthy + SKIM didn't work.
- typing kana by using a Japanese keymap shows up as '?', even when
etoys is showing up properly in Japanese.

- Missing fonts and broken 'choose language' support:
--typing Arabic only shows '?', and selecting Arabic as a language
doesn't change that; nothing seems to happen.
--selecting 'Persian' translates the user interface into a series of
'?', with a tiny bit of English for the strings that aren't
translated; the necessary font is missing, and there is no prompt to
add it.  This also applies to Singhalese and Urdu.  Turkish has a much
more minor version of this problem - most letters are there, but a few
are missing.
--typing Greek only shows '?'.  Selecting Greek as a language says
"This language needs additional fonts.  Do you want to install the
fonts? Yes / No".  Selecting 'yes' brings up a debugger, because the
.sar file for Greek fonts is missing.  This also applies to Russian,
Chinese, and Romanian.
-- Selecting Korean as a language brings up a debugger: "Error: My
subclass should have overridden #leadingChar".

I didn't evaluate Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Pushto, or Telegu, since
I don't have my system set up to input in them and none of the strings
that I happened to have on my screen were translated when I switched
to them.  I also didn't evaluate copy/paste for anything.

So: the situation is slightly better than what
http://www.nabble.com/3.10---Mac-OS-X-Leopard---accent-chars-and-keyboard-input-td15332280.html
led me to believe.  Accented Latin characters, when typed directly
(ie, without deadkeys/input methods) work out of the box in the OLPC
image, which I hope makes it into the basic Squeak image soon.
However, there are definitely still problems left as well.

If any of this is user error on my part, I'd be very glad. Assuming at
least some of it is not, while the OLPC image is a step in the right
direction - and probably would make a better baseline than the 'basic'
Squeak image - I'm still left with several of the problems my previous
email mentioned, and still very glad to hear about any successes
people have had with them.  Some of this stuff has clearly worked for
some people at some point, which is part of what makes the current
situation and its regressions so unexpected.

Regards;
Katerina Barone-Adesi



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