Opie Translation To Nepali Language

Dear Opie-Developers,

We have been working quitely to translate and deploy opie on the openzaurus
platform for the Nepali Lanaguage for the last two months, but we are
running into some problems. We would like to be the maintainers for the
Nepali Language and complete the Nepali Localization for Opie.

We are associated with the PAN Localization Project (see www.panl10n.net)
and located at the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (www.mpp.org.np). We have
translated and completed many open source projects including a OpenOffice,
Mozilla and the complete Gnome desktop environment. We have also developed
Unicode fonts and various input methods for windows.

In the next phase of the project, we are moving into mobile/PDA devices, and
also developing Machine Translation and Speech/Grammar corpuses.

We have selected opie as our first target to be translated to Nepali in PDA
devices because it is supported by a number of devices and OS platforms.
Currently we are working with Sharp Zaurus 5500. Any suggestions on whether
we should start with Opie or there is a better successor of Opie where the
work will be more meaningful? Successful translation in Nepali will enable
PAN Localization Project to start translating into other languages
associated with the project, too.


Translation is not a problem for us because we have dozens of language
experts working at the institution. Currently, we have been trying to
compile opie and install it on the OS. We have successfully compiled the
open zaurus OS, qt embedded and opie (both for the x86 environment and cross
compiled to arm-environment). However, we are having problems in installing
the compiled programs to the PDA and test it. The bitbake links are mostly
broken. Can you provide us with fresh links? We have downloaded Bitbake the
program, but when we try to use the metadata to get the stuff it does not
work? Any suggestions on whether we should use bitbake to do the work, or
compile and install manually?

We are also confused about how to change the .ts files to .qm and where to
place it or whether opie uses .qm or not. Could you clarify us in this
issue?

We did some preliminary experiments by installing devanagari (devanagari is
the script used by Nepali, Hindi and some other languages, and it is
standardized through unicode)  fonts. But the rendering was poor:

1. The fonts could not be displayed in the multikey keyboard
2. The fonts could be displayed in the texteditor, but the character glyphs
are not properly rendered. In devanagari two or more unicode characters can
combine to give a single glyph. The rendering engine does not seem to
support this correctly. When we were first working with Mozilla translation,
there was a similar problem, but it was later resolved by using the pango
library (www.pango.org).

We gather that opie uses freetype to render TTF fonts. Is this true? We
think we need to work in the font rendering part of opie to get it to work
properly with Devanagari. Can you provide us any pointers on where in the
soruce code, or elsewhere we can start looking?

Hoping to hear from you soon.

Best Regards,
Prakash Manandhar,
Team for PDA Localization to Nepali,
PAN Localization Project.

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