[Wikimediaindia-l] Android ICS support for Tamil and Indic languages

[sankarshan]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Ravishankar <ravidreams at gmail.com> wrote:

> Only few years before even PCs supported all of these and it will take more
> years to get this in all gadgets. So, the only expectation now is to at
> least display the characters well. Input is the next priority which can be
> solved by 3rd party apps for time being once the display issue is solved.

Linux distributions have had the underlying codebase infrastructure to
"support" Indian languages for close to 8 years now. Admittedly, the
frameworks have changed/improved and, the resultant APIs have evolved.
But the definition and scope of support put forth in my original mail
has existed for that period of time. So it is certainly not a "few
years".

"Displaying the characters well" is a very broad based statement and,
I'll provide an example from the 4.0.3 build - I see Bengali rendered
with some degree of accuracy when using the Gmail app, the same cannot
be said when using the Twitter app for Android. Which brings out the
notion that the ability to build up and use the existing underlying
frameworks is not very well baked in. The other bit that will be
useful to create a set of publicly available standard test pages for
Indic text. Paragraphs which have sufficient complexity being handled
via nearly all conjunct combinations and so forth would actually help
testing the mobile app to the fullest.

Input and, primarily input methods are desired to be some form of
standardization or, at least a reference implementation. In the early
days of Linux (and, very recently during the stage with the 'Rupee'
symbol), a lot of 3rd party application developers and ISVs came up
with their own implementation of input methods and layout. The
resultant effect was a large corpus of document which needed some form
of 'translation' into Unicode-compliant form. Punting on ISVs to fix
the input issue is a bad bet fraught with dangers. I am not suggesting
that the ISVs will go out and deliberately muddy up waters. But the
nature of the business and, the precedent leaves no doubt of such a
situation repeating itself.


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>