There is an even more ambitious project which just saw its curtain lifted today:
http://opendesktop.org.tw/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3 (in traditional Chinese) This project is being co-led by "Mr. Firefly" who single-handedly created the more than one hundred thousand or so of the glyphs of Chinese characters, and GPL'd them. I plan to support this project one way or another. If anyone is interested in donating your talent (at all levels), I will appreciate if you could let me know. I don't have any idea what we should do or how we can contribute (e.g., translating the progress report into English/Japanese/Korean may be something we can do here). Becoming a tester is also an important way of making contributions. Mahaho. Wayne (BTW, lobbying the Taiwan government to adopt OpenOffice.org is one of their main objectives. I believe, this is something we would very much like to duplicate on our islands, too.) >Aloha all, > >A couple of days ago, a group of Fedora Core users at Harvard released a >set of bitmap fonts which cover complete CJK >Unified Ideographics (20,902 characters at 4 pixel sizes and two >weights, totalling more than 180,000 glyphs): > >http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?BitmapSong (in simplified >Chinese) > >After installed it, my first reaction was, this is grand theft, or at >least blatant plagiarism! But, hey, this is GPL. The original creator of >these fonts (Mr. "Firefly") actually was very relieved that someone was >able to continue the torch and make the flame brighter. > >Lack of CJK support used to be an Achilles heel for Linux, but it may >have become one of its most potent weapons. > >In the English version of Windows XP-Pro, you are able to input CJK >fonts, but this ability is somewhat rudimentary. There are 3rd party >Windows programs for inputting Chinese characters, but since software is >mostly free in the Chinese-speaking commuity, no one is willing to care >about their quality. > >In a previous thread, I briefly mentioned how drastically the process of >I/O'ing Chinese fonts has improved under iiimf in FC4. Here, I will do a >very simple demo regarding Japanese characters: > >-> miyamoto musashi -> みやもと むさし -> ミヤモトムサシ -> 宮本武蔵 > >The first group of characters are your keyboard input. When iiimf is >running and activated, your screen will show the corresponding Hiragana >characters (2nd group). Press down cursor key, they convert to Katakana >(3rd group). Press space key followed by the down cursor key, a list of >Kanjis will pop up for you to select (4th group). Isn't this great? > >If you have connections to our local CJK community, and/or are >interested in promoting Linux in that community, and would like to have >a sounding board, please let me know. Wayne > >(Don't know Japanese? McKinley has an English-centric Japanese language >program. After 30 dollars and 30 hours, you may become itchy to try to >sell Fedora machines in Japan.) >_______________________________________________ >LUAU@lists.hosef.org mailing list >http://lists.hosef.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luau > >