On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 11:40 -0500, Qianqian Fang wrote: > hi Nicolas > > I agree with you for the long-term solution of the problem. Here I just > want to describe my observation to the Chinese users and my opinions > on work-around. > > Unfortunately the Chinese user community is quite weak in communicating with > the upstreams, majorly due to language reasons. More than half > of the users do not like to use English to discuss their problems, the > vast majority of the feedback and problem-solving were done at various > Chinese > Linux forums, BBS (bulletin board system) and instant messaging. > Even those who are able to describe their problem clearly in English, > only a small fraction went through all the culture training > and practicing and become a contributor. > > The bad lucks of propagating patches back to upstream is also another > reason that discourages Chinese to get involved. Chinese is one > of the most complicated scripts and is always challenging to > get what people expect without altering the default Latin handling, > therefore, the upstream developers are very cautious about any change > related to Chinese (or CJK). This also negatively impacts the situation. Hi Qianqian, [/me tries to write a motivational mail] It's easy to assume that one's problems are harder than others'. In this case, Chinese for example is a far easier script to support than Middle-Eastern scripts and definitely far easier than Indic scripts. Or in Iran, my native country, less than half of Iranians know enough English to be able to communicate at all, let alone preferring it... When I started working on Persian support in software back in 1999, it was a disaster. IE5 had just came out and had support for Unicode, but had a serious bug with the letter Persian Yeh that made it almost unusable for Persian. The community started using Arabic Yeh instead, and many individuals and companies produced fonts that had the shape of Persian Yeh in their Arabic Yeh glyph position. That's not the only problem that needed to be worked around. In the mean time, some of us started the FarsiWeb Project to systematically work on properly fixing Persian support in software. We soon got attracted to Free Software as there was not much we could do about proprietary ones other than reporting the bug (that particular IE bug took more than 4 years to fix...). Persian support in Free Software was even worse. Both KDE and GNOME had just added support for Arabic, but no Persian-specific feature was working. And there were no suitable fonts. No keyboard layout either. No translations whatsoever. Lots and lots of bugs in right-to-left UIs. The list goes on and on... While trying to learn the culture of upstream in FarsiWeb, we learned about similar projects in other countries that shared a bunch of those problems with us, namely, Arabeyes from all over the Arab countries and Ivrix from Israel. We worked on a lot of projects and patches together, with the main goal of *fixing upstream*. To make this mail short, fast forward a few years later and I now maintain Pango and HarfBuzz, comaintain cairo, hack on Gtk+, Fontconfig, and Mozilla/Firefox, and the Linux desktop has the best Persian support among all modern operating systems. We've come a long way, and there's still a lot left to go... Sorry if it was too personal and history, thought that may resonance with your feelings. Regards, -- behdad http://behdad.org/ ...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two noted exceptions: being struck by lightning, or worse, your *computer* being struck by lightning. -- Matt Welsh _______________________________________________ Fedora-fonts-list mailing list Fedora-fonts-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list
