[Indic-computing-users] 1st cut of localization newsletter (the actual one)

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Hi all,
 for those not always online, below is first cut of newsletter.

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Localization Newsletter Vol 1 (March 15-31, 2004)

*--- Editor speak ---*

So finally a rough cut of the first issue of the Localization
newsletter is ready. First on why bring it out. Our basic goal is to
collect all info on whats happening in localization scene in India and
around, Who is doing what? , Latest/recent developments, events etc
happening . Mainly to publicise widely localization activities, so
people get the whole picture rather than bits-n-pieces. This newletter
would serve as a mouthpiece for all localization teams & their
volunteers.

Since this is first version, its not much structured, & content
written in very informal way. Everyone is welcome to give their
comments on it. You can add them to LocalizationNewsletter wiki.(TBD -
add more blah blah ).

*--- Headlines ---*

    * Bangla becomes first supported Indian language in Gnome 2.6. As
on 21st March it stood at 82%, thats about 14828 strings translated in
Gnome 2.6 essentials.
    * Stats for other languages in Gnome 2.6 - Punjabi (72%), Hindi
(63%), Tamil (36%), Malayalam (33%), Marathi (17%), Kannada (5%).
See full statistics at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gtp/status/gnome-2.6/ .
    * KDE Hindi is now 80%. Thanks to tiring efforts of Ravishankar
Shrivastava and fellowship support from SARAI, KDE Hindi is now 80%
complete, thats a record of 50,000 strings translated in span of 3
months. Tamil is ahead at 91%, with Bangla at distant 34%.

*--- News Bits ---* 

** Oye Balle Balle
Amanpreet Singh Alam and Gursharn Singh recently started off Punjabi
localisation work, they have created a Gurmukhi Unicode font and doing
Gnome 2.6 translations at rocket speed completing about 16,000 strings
in a month. See http://www.geocities.com/punlinux for more. They along
with Jaswinder Singh, Narinderpal Singh and Sushil Kumar are working
Punjabi live CD based on GNOPPIX.

** World's first distro with Indian language support
PCQLinux2004 bundles IndLinux Pali release, with its March 2004 issue.
This makes it the worlds first linux distro to have Indian language
support enabled by default. PCQLinux2004 is based on Fedora, with a
lot of customization to users for home and office needs. There are
some glitches though, read
http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/PcqLinux2004 for more.

** Indic Input tool for Windows 9X.
Abhijit Dutta informs about a tool for entering Unicode-based Indic
text from older Windows machines. This could be killer app for people
using Windows 95/98 and want to type Unicod in Unicode enabled apps
like Internet Explorer (5.5 or above) , Mozilla / Netscape 7.0+,
OpenOffice, etc. Visit
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/forum/indicime.nsf and also post you
feedback on it there.

** Taming The Dragon
Jungshik Shin of Mozilla team announced of Mozilla binary built with
Pango for enabling complex script rendering. This build can be used to
browses Indian language websites using Unicode by having the right
fonts.
It's available at
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6/contrib/mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-gtk2-pango.tar.gz
He says "It's compiled with gtk2, xft and my patch for mozilla bug
215219 (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215219). Please,
spread the words so that as many people as possible can benefit from
the build. If you use a type 1 postscript font for Western langgroup,
you may have a trouble with Latin letters. There are two ways to solve
the problem. One is NOT to use type 1 postscript fonts and the other
is to upgrade Xft, fontconfig and Pango the latest. Please, refer to
the following README file for more details.
ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.6/contrib/README-pango"

** IndLinux-Hindi 0.73 (Pali) released
This is a updated release for Gnome 2.2 including Gnome 2.4 . It also
has the necessary fonts, keyboard settings and scripts to ready your
distro for Indic. Supported distros - Redhat 8/9 , Fedora Core 1,
Mandrake 9.1/9.2 . Morphix Gnome / Debian unstable with Gnome 2.x .
Download it from http://www.indlinux.org/downloads/

*--- In Focus ---*

(TBD - feature articles come here)

*--- On Watch ---*
(Dates/deadlines/future events to watch for)

*--- Team watch ---*
( log of activities of ny localization team, interviews, etc)

*--- Help ---*
Your language needs you - Do you have some time to spare & good at
your language, then you could help out with translations for your
language. Join the localization team for your project.

Bengali  - http://www.bengalinux.org/
Gujarati - http://www.indictrans.org/
Hindi    - http://www.indlinux.org/
Kannada  - http://kannada.sourceforge.net/
Malayalam - http://smc.sarovar.org/
Marathi  - http://www.indictrans.org/
Punjabi  - http://www.geocities.com/punlinux/
Oriya    - http://www.indlinux.org/oriya/
Tamil    - http://www.tamilinux.org/
Telugu   - http://www.indlinux.org/telugu/

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Regards,
Karunakar

-- 
Dream, Dream, Dream
Dreams transform into thoughts
And thoughts result in action.   -- Kalam

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* Indian Linux project    *
* http://www.indlinux.org *
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