MACadd Poll Which Language Next

Hi

I’m planning on adding multi lingual support for my MAC address information application for RISC OS called MACadd.

So I have created a poll to see what language I should do first.

The choice is in alphabetical order are

• Dutch
• French
• German

I plan to add all three, but the order will depend on the votes.

Wonder how many Cyrillic users there are using RISC OS. I think EFF had the fonts.

I produced fonts for Cyrillic, too – I have Russian relatives, learnt Russian at my grandmother’s knee. Only ever childish Russian though – narrowly failed O level (grade 7). Commended on my pronunciation by the oral examiner 8~)

(I also produced fonts for Hindi. My Hindi is better – learned that in my thirties, after meeting my then-future Indian wife in India; I’ve spent quite a lot of time in India.)

Mr. Semmens, do you know if these languages are represented in Edward Detyna’s (now disappeared, tragically..) substantial font catalog? I cannot stress enough what a major loss this is for anyone doing DTP in RISC OS these days. I miss it.

what a major loss this is for anyone doing DTP in RISC OS these days

Again you are showing your lack of understanding.
The biggest loss is that we’re still mostly stuck with 8 bit fonts (unless you fancy rolling your own font handling).

So DTP that requires something other than the usual selection of Western European characters needs special fonts, special font handling, varying degrees of additional effort for something that ought to just work, and can’t really profit from the wealth of stuff available online, now that everybody has seen beyond the limitations of TrueType and has moved on…

Pretty much everywhere else, this is mostly ¹ a solved problem, like here for example: https://fonts.google.com/?subset=devanagari&script=Deva

As always, far too many years and far too little investment. Sound familiar?
So, really, if one wants good DTP then maybe one should look to fixing FontManager and introducing support for modern fonts rather than farting around with delusions of a shiny new 64 bit OS.

¹ The word “mostly” added in case nemo is watching. ;)

Bin the font manager and use Freetype?

Acorn’s font format was clever for the time for its auto hinting, but requires font curves’ points to be in a unique position (the centre of the curves at the left/right extremes so it can adjust the control points to result in flattening to grid pixels). This can’t be converted automatically, so auto-converted fonts hint badly.

Using Freetype gives you auto hinting using algorithms designed for the font data it supports. There’s no point in reinventing it.

The word “mostly” added in case nemo is watching. ;)

Or me 8~)

do you know if these languages are represented in Edward Detyna’s

Yes, they were. Unlike mine, his Hindi didn’t have a matching keyboard, so it wasn’t touch-typable. But as Rick says, it was all severely limited by RISCOS’s woefully tiny font handling capacity anyway. Modern systems have more-or-less fixed that*, but they’ve still not got decent keyboards for Indic languages, and don’t look likely to.

* Unicode handling of Indic languages was evidently designed by Indians who learned their native languages at their ayah’s knees, but had all their education in English medium, and never really learned their native languages properly at all. (I have a nephew, who despite his ancestors having been poor villagers, is following precisely this path right now 8~( ).

I can’t speak for other non-European languages.

Two thing to pollute this thread… MS have just dumped Adobe type 1 fonts, ISTR labouring somewhere to support them. Raspberry Pi just supported RISC V (in addition to ARM). One swallow and all that, but an OS fixed to ARM 64 seems less a good idea.

I cannot stress enough what a major loss this is for anyone doing DTP in RISC OS these days.

Who in their right mind would be stupid enough to be still doing DTP in RISC OS in this day and age?

Oh yeah, right. (I do) I’ll get my coat!
[crawls_back_under_the_rock_from_whence_I_came]

Me,
I can also do music, math, programming etc and update my website, at my level of course.

I can do it on another system, but meh…(bof, in French)

Who in their right mind would be stupid enough to be still doing DTP in RISC OS in this day and age?

Isn’t Archive created on RISC OS?

Wasn’t one of the mainstream magazines, back in the day, written in Impression?

https://riscos.fr/frob31/ ?

Whether or not you can do DTP on RISC OS depends quite a lot on what you want to do. The platform and its software is still capable even if it doesn’t have all of the features of modern products.

So, writing in English or française, perfectly doable. In 日本語 or עִבְרִית‎, not so much. But as Clive has mentioned, where there’s a will there’s a brick wall to headbutt. ;)
PS: Hebrew specifically added because NetSurf gets it wrong, it is rendered the other way around. Iris gets it right.

We produced The Journal of Physiology, The Journal of Experimental Physiology, and The Proceedings of the Physiological Society – a total of about 1,800 pages of scientific papers a month – on Impression, back in the 1990s. https://clive.semmens.org.uk/RISCOS/ThirtyYears.html#JPhys

I never had my own copy of Impression, or I might still be using it. If Ovation had already existed when I first set up the Physiological Society’s system, I’d probably have used that – and might still be. As it is, I use LibreOffice on a Mac – but I’m not doing anything nearly as demanding with DTP these days.

a total of about 1,800 pages of scientific papers a month

☝️
🏆

If you want your langauage next vote

Just out of interest, how do you plan to add languages? Do you speak Dutch/French/German? A friendly native? Google Translate?

Edit: Quick look at the code, you’re not using MessageTrans. That should probably be the first thing to do. Other languages become much easier afterwards.

Hebrew specifically added because NetSurf gets it wrong, it is rendered the other way around. Iris gets it right.

You need to store the text twice, once with it in input order, and then a second time ordered for rendering. It’s quite a fun algorithm to implement and debug.

https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/

Arabic is then more fun as letters have different shapes depending on if they are at the start, middle or end of a word. And also then has many ligatures, just like ‘fl’ in Latin, but often for whole words (Allah, most commonly). This is where modern font formats are important since the font data stores the ligature to glyph mappings since it’s up to the font vendor which to implement.

Iris will use the ICU library which does this plus much more (word splitting for different languages…)

Having participated in the “Francisation” of Organizer, I find that the method used by Chris Morrison and Martin Avison is very good. I only had to deal with message files.

I will use google translate and it will be in message files mainly

I will use google translate

Oh dear. :-)

My French might suck (comme une vache espagñole), but even I can see some things that Google Translate does weirdly. It’s not bad ¹ but you may need to review what it spits out. Pay particular attention to negation.

¹ Speaking for French, I have no experience of German or Dutch; however it is worth pointing out that somebody made an online game of translating to and from Japanese because, well, go try it for yourself: https://www.translationparty.com/ – astonishingly it ALMOST works with NetSurf – you can click on previous translation parties but you can’t fire off your own (JavaScript…). Try this. ;)

There is hardly any phrases used in MACadd application, on the main window the longest bit of English text is Company name and address to cursor then Enter MAC address. The rest of the main window is one or two words followed by the data which apart from the country name is language independent.

I will use google translate

Good luck. For some languages it’s not too bad. For some, it’s okay in one direction and rubbish in the other; for others it’s rubbish in both directions. Rubbish sometimes means hilarious, sometimes it means incomprehensible or just plain wrong. Even in the best cases it can make the odd absolute howler.

I would say instead of picking a language to google translate, ask for a native speaker to translate the messages file you. Then make any changes needed to the templates for things such as bloodylonggermanwords, although probably not necessary with your style of using lots of empty space in windows.

ask for a native speaker to translate the messages file you

This, absobloodylutely!!!!

Anything else is at best a horrible waste of time.

Implementing Unicode, could that fix it. In a 64-bit RISC OS system.

Implementing Unicode, could that fix it.

You’re days late in this thread and a few years in these forums with that conclusion.

In a 64-bit RISC OS system.

That would break it again, so, “hush child, grown-ups are speaking.”