AddingNewLanguage

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 * Creating a glibc locale  * Creating a glibc locale:
  * [[http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=localedata/README;h=f05bf15cebb64284f0872357c8c68c8105e7c73f;hb=HEAD|Documentation]]

Before a new translation team can effectively use Launchpad for translations, there must be a font, keyboard, and locale available to be used in Ubuntu. There are many languages where some or none of these items are not in place. This page will describe a few things that must be submitted that will help the language support for a language.

Locales

POSIX

OpenOffice.org

Mozilla

Fontconfig and Orthographic Information

Useful information to gather before localization is the orthographic information. This includes the Unicode Code Points that are used to display the characters that make up a written language.

Fontconfig uses these in orth files. These orth files are named after the ISO-639-3 code. For instance the orth file for Secwepemctsin would be shs.orth and the orth file for English would be en.orth.

Before collecting this information it would be good to download the upstream source files and look through the fc-lang directory for a list of the languages which have orthographic information. If your language is not found then you can submit your own information. Many of the North American Indigenous languages are missing orthographic information, as well as many other languages.

If you're language is not included in fontconfig you can collect the orthographic information and submit it to the upstream source. You could then talk with the Ubuntu fontconfig maintainers to see if the next release will contain your information, if not then you can ask them to included a patched version of fontconfig until they bymp the release.

Fonts

Once orthographic information is part of Fontconfig one can use fc-list to determine which fonts that can be used to display your language.

Keyboards

Some languages need special keyboard layouts to easily input all of their characters. There are various ways to do this a common and easy way to is create a xkb layout. This is then submitted to xkeyboard-config at freedesktop.org.

Before you start creating a keyboard you should read the submission rules. It is not to difficult to create a new layout. The easiest way is to copy a keyboard that is similar to your keyboard with the added characters needed to type in your language.

Put example here.

Additional sources


CategoryTranslations

Translations/KnowledgeBase/AddingNewLanguage (last edited 2011-03-22 10:56:04 by 226)