[Etoys] Greek and other languages support

[Luke Gorrie]

On 09/12/2007, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> wrote:
>   Luke, I know try to address Nepali.  It is even a harder task, but
> I'll try...

Thanks, this does sound hard!

With the instructions that you and Bert gave I was successfully able
to import unicode Nepali text into Squeak, however the Nepali guys
said it looked too mangled: many adjacent vowels and consonants should
have been combined into compound glyphs but weren't. This sounds to me
like the known limitation of the non-Pango renderer that you
mentioned?

I was copy&pasting from Firefox on my Mac (Nepali wikipedia) and they
pointed out that it looked mangled there too. I don't know if that
would have affected the results in Squeak but guessed not.

We imported the text as bitmaps for now. This isn't *that*
inconvenient -- it's really hard to get Nepali text on the computer in
any case. Most people don't know how to type in Nepali -- not even
Nepali computer programmers. Luckily one of the programmers in our
office is also a novelist and he can type up a sheet of sentences for
us when needed :-)

It will be quite something if kids learn to type in Nepali on the XOs!

Cheers,
-Luke