Hi,
I received the following mail personally. The writer permitted
me to cite it to linux-utf8.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: relevance of "[PATCH] tty utf8 mode" in linux-kernel 2.6.4-rc1
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 09:34:37 -0500
> (I cant post to this list right now, its refusing my ISP's email relay
> so I'm writing to you directly)
>
> Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
>
> >Why do you think Kanji support is somewhat "fancyful" while the real
> >Linux kernel has been supporting Latin/Cyrillic/Arabic/Greek and UTF-8?
> >Is it because east Asian people are less important than European people?
> >
> >
>
> This is a good point, however it may be impractical to load a full
> featured unicode settings and options, input method, and conversion
> engine very early in the kernel bootstrap process.
> Even if it was added to the kernel the resulting size might still be
> too much to get meaningful support into LILO or GRUB, for example.
>
> A compromise might be to use half-width katakana for kernel startup
> messages. English has accepted a considerable amount of change from the
> world of typewriters and computers such that the language has been
> adapted to accomodate them as much as they to it. For very small
> embedded systems and kernel bootstrap routines, half-width katakana or
> a similar language compromise is more practical in my opinion.
>
> Once the full, general purpose operating system has been loaded, a
> proper and full featured language interface would of course become
> available.
>
> I think this is a reasonable compromise: A user who was not interested
> in the guts of the operating system would never see this stuff anyway:
> instead they would be presented with a nice shiny graphic while the
> system started up.
>
>
> ヨロシク,
In my opinion, i18n support of Linux console is important primarily
for reading translated messages from various administrating commands.
In Japanese case, translated messages are written in normal Japanese
(mixture of Hiragana and Kanji (and Katakana for transliteration from
foreign languages)), not in Katakana. It is impossible to transliterate
from normal Hiragana-Kanji Japanese text to Katakana text easily.
(It needs dictionary of whole Japanese vocabulary, which is apparently
much larger than a set of Japanese font).
To read Japanese translated messages, support of Hiragana, Katakana,
and Kanji (CJK Ideogram) is needed. A compromise will be discussed
what range of CJK Ideogram will be supported. In case of Japanese,
JIS X 0208 (less than 7000 characters) would be a moderate choice.
JIS X 0212 (less than 7000 characters) set is also included in the
"CJK Unified Ideographs" (U+4E00 - U+9FAF), but it would be optional
for Linux console.
It may be feasible that Japanese *input* support of Linux console
will be limited to Hiragana or Katakana, because Japanese input system
will need dictionary of whole Japanese vocabulary and grammatical
analysis system. (In future, when such large amount data will be
relatively "small" than average disk/network capacity, there might
be real need to support Japanese input.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
