On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:28 AM, Ravishankar ravidreams@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.