Elliotte Harold wrote:
> XML has much better support for more languages than any word processor
> or operating system I've ever seen. (Here I do mean the end user
> definition of an OS such as Windows, Mac OS X, Ubuntu, etc; not just
> the CS definition of OS)
>
> Maybe there's a Linux distro somewhere that supports Cherokee,
> Cambodian, or Amharic. There certainly isn't Windows or Mac OS X that
> does though.
I used polytonic Greek Unicode for years before I had an operating
system that really supported it. And I did this largely in XML, which
fortunately did not prohibit characters in the language I cared about. I
had to use tools that most people using the operating system did not
use. If you have a font, a keyboard driver, and an editing environment
that support your language, you're able to do most things.
I'm using Fedora 8. Just for laughs I went to Alan Wood's Cherokee page
to try out the first language you mention:
http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/cherokee.html
It displayed properly using Firefox. I tried copying this to
OpenOffice's word processor, it did not display properly, and switching
to the Gentium font didn't seem to help. But I also copied it into
gedit, where it worked perfectly.
I wasn't able to find a keyboard driver for Cherokee, we don't seem to
ship one as part of our standard distribution ;->
I didn't try any of these with the other languages (my time for such
things is limited).
Jonathan
