Hi,

May I suggest that  improvement the area of multi-lingualization should
be major goal for KDE4.

Qt is going through some interesting changes right now (for example, a
patch that allows GTK-like input method modules).

The other thing that needs to fixed, however, is the font system.
Although I would say the majority of the problem comes from Qt's font
substitution implementation, once that is fixed, KDE apps will need to
be modified to ask for the right kinds of fonts.

I'm working on a document to explain this but it essentially comes down
to the fact that you need to have an API that lets an application ask
for a font for some language (or more specifically script). This also
means that many KDE apps will need to be modified to be aware of what
language they are dealing with.

Some might think "just look at the locale" but its not quite that
simple. For example, you may have an IRC program with different
languages in each channel. Both may be using utf-8, but you want
different fonts for each (especially if you are talking about
Chinese/Japanese/Korean texts). You're locale may say use Japanese or
wahtever, but for a Korean channel, using a Japanese font to render some
characters may be incorrect.

Although I'm not anywhere close to having the solution yet, I would like
to point this problem out for KDE4. Gnome already gets this right (or at
least more right, thanks to pango and fontconfig), and my guess is that
since the majority of kde users are western, they may not notice it as
much. It will likely be a change that requires the app developers to
re-think their designs a bit, or at least re-work some configuration
dialogs.

If anything, we need to get the message out to all the developers that
unicode doesn't solve all your problems. Its a good step forward, but it
introduces a lot of issues as well, and KDE/Qt needs to come up with
some ways to deal with them.

Ken

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 13:37:51 +0200
Fabrice Mous <fabricemous@xs4all.nl> wrote:

> Hi all, 
> 
> As aKademy is approaching I would like to do some interviews/articles
> with several contributors about the KDE project and what we can expect
> from aKademy. (As a sidenote ..  I would like to ask for some help
> with writing these articles.)
> 
> One of such a nice topic is what we can expect from the upcoming
> KDE4[1]. What plans do developers have for KDE 4? Do we have so called
> "blocker features"? 
> 
> Please contact me on the kde-promo[2] mailinglist or write me an
> e-mail if you think you can help. 
> 
> Regards, 
> 
> Fab
> 
> 
> [1]http://conference2004.kde.org/userconf.php
> [2]https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-promo
> -- 
> www.kde.nl | fabrice@kde.nl | www.kde.org
>