L10n · I still don't have a title

L MIDDLE DOT in X.Org

Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:03:00 +0000

English (Queen’s English) is the only real language.

After this required short announcement by our main sponsor, Daniel Stone, lets go ahead and explain something of interest to the many Catalan X.Org users out there.

Ivan and I have been looking at the issues that block a GNU/Linux user from using the compound geminate L, Ŀ, instead of the more usual “L·L” spelling.

The “ŀ” and “Ŀ” characters are unfortunately not included in ISO-8859-1, so fonts were the first big problem we faced. When modern X desktops started using True Type fonts by default, the de-facto free font in most distributions became Bitstream Vera as soon as they were licensed under a Free Software license back in 2003. Bitstream did not include the Unicode glyphs U+013F and U+0140, but some time after, chatting with daf, I learned he was working on Olwen, a Vera extension which would add proper Welsh coverage. He promptly added the Catalan glyphs, but Olwen never got widely exposed in distributions. Luckily, things are changing lately. Due to the lack of bugfixes or new releases of Vera, the list of Vera derivatives like Olwen started growing. The DejaVu project is building a font family, based on Vera, which merged many of these smaller purpose Vera derivatives, including Olwen. DejaVu, is, as far as I know, slowly replacing Bitstream Vera as the standard free, high quality true type font in free desktops.

With the font blocker easily solvable now, the next problem was making the input easy. Some terminals, such as GNOME’s or rxvt, allow you to insert Unicode typing a Unicode code point. The Spanish layouts don’t provide a shortcut for it though, and if you try to do Level3-Shift+l, you’ll get a Polish character, “ł”, that is of no use in neither Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque or other languages in the Spanish state.

We wanted to replace that with ŀ, but when we had a look at it last Saturday night during our stay in Bruxelles, we couldn’t find what the name for Unicode’s U+0140/U+013F was in XKB-speak. So, as I said, on Sunday I went looking for Daniel and Keith to see if we would be clued up.

The solution is easy: there is no name mapping, but you can use Unicode in 0x100XXXX notation directly in your X config file to make it work. He tried in his laptop, and why not, generated a patch for X.Org 7.0’s xkeyboard-config. Daniel can’t be that good, so he forced me to spread lies about the English language in this blog entry if we wanted the patch committed. :) Support for X.Org 6.8 and 6.9 isn’t planned, unless you bribe your X maintainer to add a tiny patch.

This has been implemented as an “es” keyboard extension (named “cat”) because other systems don’t have that feature in the Spanish layout, and X.Org wants to remain compatible with the rest. We’ll have to add a

 Option "XkbVariant" "cat"

option to our keyboard section in xorg.conf.

If you’re not using X.Org 7.0, you might want to try:

xmodmap -e "keycode 46 = l L U140 U13f U140 U13f"

but I don’t know if that’ll work in all systems. To test in your keyboard, that’ll probably be “AltGr+l” or “AltGR+L”.

What we need to do now is to add support for the character in more fonts, alternative spellings for words using the “ela geminada” (ie, “col·labora” and “coŀlabora”) in dictionaries, wordlists…, and of course, teach users about the avalability of this, and promote its usage.

Debian installer under control

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 21:10:00 +0000

I just committed the final remaining bits of our Catalan translation for Debian installer. Finally I can be happy when the next beta comes out, as I won’t feel guilty anymore. ;) Thanks to bubulle and vorlon for caring, they really made me get my ass moving and finish my already rotting translation before it was completely useless. I won’t do the documentation myself. I remember doing parts of that for the Woody release notes and I remember it was quite tedious, but hopefully there’ll be plenty of volunteers to do it.

Jeff Bailey asked me yesterday what is the “official” DVD-Ripper for GNOME. I don’t know of any… is there one? If not, I guess it’d be cool to have one, just to piss the MPAA a bit. :) Speaking of that, I read in today’s newspaper that the Oscar Awards Ceremony won’t be totally live on TV, it’ll have a slight delay just in case someone decides to show their penis or breast or butt in the middle. Heh, America is funny.

The Valencian exam went very well: the text was about trains (which I love), and I just had to read a few lines, and then comment a bit about the topic. After two or three minutes, the examiner said it was enough, and told me I’d have news soonish. Woot.

The silly virus appeared to be declining a bit in the last days, but today it hit my mail server very hard again. It’s annoying… that box is a P150 and on normal circumstances it just idles and idles, but now it’s very loaded and hitting swap most of the time, annoying me with the HD noise. If only the stupid windows ~~users~~ developers could get a clue and fix their crap… grrr!

Orkut is getting boring.

Reorganisation of the Debian Catalan translations

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:26:00 +0000

Guillem and I have finally decided what coordination strategy we want to use for Debian’s reborn Catalan l10n team. The Dutch and French teams have a quite organised method that works through e-mail, as we wanted, and provides a way of nicely tracking the status of all the translations that Debian translators need to care about. We have a proposal written which we’ll mail to debian-l10n-catalan@l.d.o tomorrow, let’s see if people like it.

Uploaded GTranslator 1.1.4 to Debian, after applying a patch to remove some GTK 2.3-only (I guess) stuff.

Yesterday I went to bed at 1:30AM, probably managed to get asleep at around 4:30. Excellent…

World Domination Plan delayed a bit

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 19:11:00 +0000

Today I was prodded publicly on debian-l10n-catalan@lists.debian.org about the lack of Catalan translations for Debian Installer… looks like I had slacked for too long, although I had finally restarted my work on this during the last few days. Finishing it isn’t a big problem -it’s not that big-, what was slowing me down was my lack of experience to merge the big full ca.po into the little modules’ po files. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t learned about msgmerge -C, which will do the trick (although it’s still quite time consuming, at least for the first commits which will need changes to probably all the installer modules). Christian Perrier and Steve Langasek (the very famous Catalan-American ;) have offered help to handle this. I’ll probably accept their kind offer tomorrow, when I finish putting my po more or less in shape. All of this makes me wonder something else, though. What is the status of the SGML installer and release notes docs for Sarge? Has work started on this? If so, I should probably find some minion to handle the Catalan translation if we want to have it ready in time.

In short, the Catalan World Domination Plan has been slightly delayed, but just wait… in 10 months or so you’ll find yourselves saying “Bon dia!” every morning!

I need to find some time to do some GNOME commits I have pending, mostly Catalan corrections from Jordi Mas to a zillion modules in the extra and fifth-toe sections. I promise it’ll be done by the weekend.

I also have to do my usual ration of studying, plus some cycling training, plus I have to be in a party in about 2 hours. This weekend is going to be short…

I tried to upload the new mailutils snapshot today, but found out it requires the new gnutls packages which are stuck in the new/ queue. I downloaded the packages from Ivo’s web, but can’t upload until the packages hit incoming. This started a discussion which made us find out a few packages still use gnutls5. Time to change that… On other fronts, StevenK fixed the remaining issues with alsa-driver 1.0.1, and it’s ready for upload. Probably tomorrow. What we can’t upload yet is alsa-lib, that’s going to get hairy thanks to an API change in 1.0.x…

Now, off to cook some Spanish omelet…

Fucked priorities

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:48:00 +0000

I hate when I know I have something important to do, and I keep avoiding doing it by doing all sorts of other lower priority tasks.

For example, I just read Antti-Juhani’s call for help on dctrl-tools’ i18n/l10n. Instead of studying for the already too menacing exams, or at least translating Debian Installer, I suddenly felt the _urge_ to have a look at this package. The result is cool, grep-dctrl is now translated to Catalan for the next release, but the really important duties remain undone. Antti-Juhani just pointed out that I’m obviously not the only one, and I think I’m glad I don’t have a cat, at least. :)

Let’s see if I can get *something* done in the next few hours. After scribbling this stupid blog entry, things don’t look too bright, though. ;)

Buried below po files

Sun, 04 Jan 2004 19:35:00 +0000

Exams are near, so it’s probably translation season again, that time of the year when I work hard on all those Catalan translations I have neglected during the last months.

This evening I’ve restarted my work on GNOME 2.6, due on March. The number of new strings or strings to update is long, but I normally make it. What worries me is that the proposed modules for inclusion in GNOME 2.6 will add 6000+ strings to the list, and I’m not sure we’ll be able to cope with that. There’s an ongoing thread on gnome-i18n discussing this.

While doing updates and assigning modules to other translators, I’ve noticed that our gal translation was quite outdated, but I remember Aleix had updated it recently. For some months, Evo folks have asked to translate evolution 1.4, and recently they switched their focus to 1.5. All the translation work on evolution-1-4-branch hasn’t been ported to HEAD, so the gal translation was temporarily lost. Of course, I watch for these things for my team, but I wonder how many translations get lost during branch transitions at GNOME’s CVS. Another example, with the libmrproper -> planner transition, we have lost our last update to libmrproper’s ca.po. I need to merge them back manually using msgcat or whatever.

Besides GNOME, I had also promised Debian Installer translations for December 28, but never got near finishing it. It won’t take long though, that’s #1 priority right now. On the Debian Catalan l10n front, Guillem and I are planning a rebirth of the Catalan team, as the current model didn’t scale too well: I was the only person reviewing what needed committing, and some of the translations that came in needed hours of correction work, so I ended burning out. Now there are other Catalan-speaking Debian developers, and hopefully we’ll be able to work more efficiently in the future.