About i18n, I've read the "encoding.lyx" article written by Asger
Alstrup Nielsen. (By the way, the file is no longer available at the URL
where I got it before. Is it no longer available?) The article is
talking about strings and encodings in LyX v1.2. Regarding this article
and i18n/l10n, I've got a few questions (mainly concerning Unicode) in my
mind:
For translations in menus/messages (ie. excluding documentations)
which are encoded in multi-byte encoding, eg for Asian languages, isn't
it better that these translations should be encoded in Unicode?
Actually, newer versions of XFree86 support already natively Unicode, so
do a lot of commercial X (if not all). So I suppose characters (eg in
menus) are displayed using Unicode. However, people still use Big5 as
traditional Chinese encoding. Convesion from Big5 to and from Unicode
isn't quite straightforward as from Latin-1 to and from Unicode. If the
translation is done in Big5, there will be a lot of unnecessary
conversion Big5 <-> Unicode. That's why I ask if it's better to use
Unicode as the underlying encoding. I take Chinese as an example, but
the argument can be very well applied to Japanese, Korean and any
language encodings other than Latin-1.
I see that for the moment there's no translation for Chinese,
Japanese or Korean (and other non Latin-1 languages). Thus, maybe it's
not too late to apply this.
But of course, this would raise a second question: how is one
supposed to edit in Unicode? With what editor? I just know yudit but I
just managed to make it work partially. And how are .po files saved? In
utf-7, utf-8 or UCS-2? Probably not in UCS-2, I think, but I might be
wrong. Who knows?
