State of Text Rendering [LWN.net]

State of Text Rendering

Posted Jul 16, 2009 17:04 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
In reply to: State of Text Rendering by jordanb
Parent article: State of Text Rendering

> "Asian Opposition" to Unicode was really opposition within certain
> segments of the Japanese computing industry, who preferred the old model
> of foreign companies finding it difficult to work with their baroque,
> flaky, and mutually incompatible local character sets.

Sure, but they managed to convince many third-parties in the meanwhile

> Regarding your example of Americans seeing British spelling, that's not
> how it works. If you're a Chinese person you will have your computer
> localized for China.

That's not true anymore. Localized systems, like non-network systems, are increasingly the past (especially in the Linux world where distros ship the same image to everyone). When your system supports many different languages with conflicting requirements (or when many users use the en_US locale because they're not satisfied with their localization either because it's bad, or because they're so saturated with English technical terms they don't recognise their translation anymore), you can't rely on defaults to mask the lack of language awareness at the application level.

I don't think Fedora managed a single release in the past 2-3 years where Chinese, Japanese or Korean users didn't complain the general non-local defaults were too biaised in favour of one of the others (there is also the problem they want different processing for latin than others, as pointed in Behdad's paper)

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