Am 01.04.2014 21:12, schrieb Georg Baum:
I should have also said that personally I would not use a program that
does not support my language. I mean how should I use LyX when I cannot
write German with it: no German hyphenation, no spell-checker, English
terms like "Figure", etc.
I agree that this is important for many people. I also agree that missing
languages should be added rather sooner than later. However, I do not agree
to do this in a way which violates basic software engineering principles: If
anybody implements a new feature it needs to be tested by somebody who has
enough knowledge of that feature, and is not the person who implemented it.
Omitting these tests leads to crappy software, and I don't want LyX to
become known as crappy.
I understand you point and I would fully agree for a language used in a region where computer are
widespread and, more important, people can rely on electricity the whole day. During my travels I
learned that outside the western world one cannot use our principles. For example in Bolivia, most
people don't have the money to buy software. They mainly (still) use a cracked Win XP and Open
source software because it is free. Most use old laptops so that they can also work for a while when
the circuit is down. For Internet access they go to an Internet store for an hour to send and
receive mails and to download programs. The students are however as clever as we are and do a lot to
improve programs they need/want. In Bolivia they can benefit from many programs because of Spanish.
For Urdu they will most probably not. So what are their options: to use a cracked old MS Word with
basic or crappy Urdu support or to give LyX a try. LyX will already provide spell-checking,
translations of words like "Figure" and hyphenation. The output looks fine as Jamil stated, only the
ligatures withing LyX are not yet working. Well, that can be improved but one can already use LyX to
write texts.
In the Western-world we have a relative high level of expectations - when something is not working
perfectly, people tend to give up quickly while in other parts of the world people are more thankful
that they at all have something that basically works for free and that they can get feedback and can
help to improve it. (Try that e.g. with MS Word - even if you have a support contract, your feature
request or bug report will not be fixed soon if your company is too small or you are a private
person. And only very few in non-Western countries have the money for a Software support contract.)
OK, I have never been in a country where Urdu is spoken, Jamil could state more precisely about it,
I only wanted to explain why I think our strict rules are not helpful in every case for every
region. (Which does not mean that I want to weak LyX's development rules in principle! I only refer
to language support.)
best regards Uwe
