Archive for the ‘Fedora-i18n’ Category
Mapper - still hackish!
March 7th, 2007
Mapper - still very hackish, but works - atleast to be used in case of emergency - much much better than reading the keymap manually 
Download - Mapper (PyGtk)
Posted in Fedora-i18n | Comments (2)
Now a member of The GNOME Foundation
February 15th, 2007
Dear Mayank Jain,
We are pleased to inform you that you are now part of the GNOME
Foundation Membership. You are now eligible to become a candidate
for election and to vote in the annual Board of Directors elections
held each November…
All the hard work - bugs, patches & keymaps I’ve been contributing to upstream (Gnome majorly) have not gone waste… & I was paid in gold this morning when I got an email from the GNOME Foundation Membership Committee confirming my membership.
Also, part of this credit goes to Red Hat - where everyday, my efforts get streamlined into measureable outputs.
Thanks everyone
Posted in A strong urge to blog..., Fedora-i18n, It calls for a blog..., Life @ RedHat | Comments (5)
Weekend testing - Abiword 2.6 (Indic i18n) [Mistook 2.4.6 to 2.6, doh!]
February 3rd, 2007
Doh! I’m so sorry, I mistook 2.4.6 as 2.6 version. 2.4.x series had no support for Indic languages. I’ll update my testing again for version 2.5.1 (devel) and blog again about my findings. This post should aint be of any good use. Sorry again.
Some days ago, I had responded on one of the Abiword blogs (msevior) that I was interetsed in testing the new Abiword release - 2.6.0 for Indic i18n. And today, after almost two weeks, I managed to get 2 free hours, after having a turbo charged “Exotica” pizza from Pizza Hut [Who says caffiene stimulates your nervous system! Pizza does it equally well - probably better!]
Abiword seems pretty nicely designed, but had some issues with rendering. I tested Abiword on following three aspects
- Rendering
- Inputting text
- Printing
Though printing & inputting Indic text worked as expected, rendering Indic text was my major concern. The first & most critical problem I found was that for indic text to be visible, the text had to be marked with the corresponding Indic font, otherwise the text would appear as circles! & the reverse was also equally frightening - if you type text with a hindi font (say Lohit Hindi) and SCIM is not activated, ie - the input is in plain english, the text is rendered as square boxes instead of plain english text. I think there’s some serious problem with the way Abiword uses fallback font or does font selection.
Other issues included ability to add more vovels to an existing vovel, giving something like this…
Another screenshot of interest - http://bugzilla.abisource.com/attachment.cgi?id=4113
Here is a complete bug list
10812 - Abiword does not selects font automatically according to …
10813 - Unable to render complex indic characters
10814 - Typing english text when indic font is selected, gives sq…
10815 - Unable to render ZWNJ properly
10816 - Vovels are not rendered properly for indic scripts.
10817 - Preedit window is randomply placed on the screen
10818 - Abiword cannot print when indic text is written, but corr…
Apart from this, I also found two very interesting things in Abiword.
- The right click menu in text area gives an option to select the Input Method Engine (IME)- which is very very nice as compared to OO.writer - for which if the IME does not works, you cannot tell if it started or not or was there any other problem or that is GTK_IM_MODULE variable is set or not!
- Abiword uses a preedit window to display the preedit text - as compared to the underlined text which is displayed by GTK+ apps.
With this, they have managed to escape preedit replication problems like Bug 166231 and Bug 199551, but got caught in a problem of preedit window placement - which currently seemed very random (unlike at the bottom of preedit string everytime in Gedit).
But all this being said, Abiword seems to be a very nice app, had very fast responses & has the ability to be ported to embedded devics like N800 maybe [wink]
…looking forward to use Abiword on my N800 
Posted in A strong urge to blog..., Blog, Fedora-i18n, Life @ RedHat | Comments (3)
GNUnify 07, 27/28th Jan
January 29th, 2007
An excellent event! & as usual, Ramky was onto his clicking spree just as the event started - even he & the professional photographer kinda conducted their own BOF at the event
Here is what Ramky had to offer me this morning 
Kartik & Me attending Karunakar’s presentation
Coincidence - well, not much - it was expected - Me & Karunakar were speaking on the same topic… but luckily enough, his & my audience were different - thanks to the 10 AM schedule wink; wink;
The amazing GNUnify staff - each one had an equivalent amount of such high energy levels that attending the event, for anyone - speakers & audience was a pleasure! Three cheers for them!
(Check out Ramky’s photo set for GNUnify 07)
For more pictures of the event, please head over to 
Ramky’s Flickr. His lens has some real magic!
Posted in Fedora-i18n, GNU/Linux | Comments (6)
From a workshop at GNUnify
January 27th, 2007
I’m writing this entry while attending a Font development workshop by Karunakar & Ravi. The day went pretty well, with my presentation kickstarting the Localization track in Room 407
Everything went perfect, except that…
- The projector did not picked up my ATI display
- I had to give Fedora’s presentation on a Suse machine - thank god, it was atleast Linux!
- The Suse machine did not had any Indic fonts installed besides Hindi font
- Rendering in Suse was broken - probably it was using an older version of libicu (OO.org)
- OO.org presenter was crashing every time I was escaping from the presentation mode
- I had no root access to the machine, the machine’s owner was too nervous to enter it rightly
- I was unable to run most of my examples as I had no root access to install the translations
- SCIM was not in sight - not installed
Anyways, nothing hampered the presentation Things went pretty nicely with quite a lot of discussion during the presentation, though I had expected more.
I sincerely thank the GNUnify team for the event & for inviting me (& Red Hat) for a talk
Okay… back to the event, there’s an interesting presentation on “Debugging with GDB” coming up at 4pm!
PS: BTW, I was about to attend a presentation - “Web Automation & Testing with Sahi” - but the moment I entered the hall, I saw the guys configuring a Windows machine & I knew that it was time to leave for another presentation! Ramky has taken some interesting shots of the scene, I’ll add them as soon as I can grab them
Event’s pictures to come… stay tuned!
Posted in Fedora-i18n, GNU/Linux | Comments (1)