Open Road

Burmese OpenOffice

Andrew Cunningham — Mon, 19 May 2008 03:16:39 +0000

A Burmese localisation project for OpenOffice has been established and is under way. The Burmese OpenOffice is based on the Unicode 5.1 Myanmar block. The localisation team are looking for beta testers.

A translation project has been set up to translate OpenOffice interface into Burmese. The Burmese translation project are looking for volunteers.

Other projects that are in development or will commence in the near future include:

A Burmese (my_MM) locale for the Common Locale Data Repository.
A Burmese collation algorithm for ICU.
A Burmese line breaking algorithm for ICU

All these will be based on the Unicode 5.1 Myanmar block.

Firefox and web email services: Hotmail

Andrew Cunningham — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 07:09:02 +0000

In the first and second parts I gave an example of using stylish to control font display for minority languages within Gmail and Yahoo. In this post I will quickly look at Hotmail.

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Firefox and web email services: Yahoo

Andrew Cunningham — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:01:35 +0000

In the first part I gave an example of using stylish to control font display for minority languages within Gmail. In this post II’ll quickly look at Yahoo’s new email web interface. These CSS rules do not apply to the classic mail UI.

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Latin as a complex script

Andrew Cunningham — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:15:07 +0000

Current font technologies and font rendering systems make a distinction between writing scripts that require complex rendering and those scripts that do not. In most cases Latin is treated as a non-complex script. For a range of African and South East Asian languages that use the Latin script, the Latin script needs to be treated as a complex script.

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Language specific styling

Andrew Cunningham — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 04:48:45 +0000

The W3C website has an article on using CSS 2.1 selectors to apply language specific styling based on the language of an element. This is quite an effective tool for developing websites with multilingual content.

The key drawback to using language specific styling is Internet Explorer’s limited support for CSS 2.1 selectors. Although there are strategies to address Internet Explorer’s deficiencies.

Vicnet’s internal projects may involve one language, five languages or seventy languages. Language specific styling is a useful way to address a range of design issues within websites with multilingual content. this article will provide a brief look at the some of the strategies and techniques we use within our projects.

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Intersections in cyberspace 2: Centrelink and DIAC multilingual content

Andrew Cunningham — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 07:29:10 +0000

In part 1 I indicated that I would discuss internationalization of Australian Government websites with respect to accessibility by referencing two particular federal government websites. In this article I’ll be discussing the Centrelink and DIAC websites.

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Community Languages Online

Andrew Cunningham — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:37:57 +0000

The Community Languages Online report has been published on the eGovernment Resource Centre.

The report explores current practice and future directions of multilingual information on Victorian Government websites. It details findings and recommendations from research into how multilingual web-based government information can be created and used in the best way for culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

This report was produced for the former Department for Victorian Communities (now part of the Department of Planning and Community Development) by Vicnet, a division of the State Library of Victoria.

Intersections in cyberspace: internationalisation, accessibility and community languages

Andrew Cunningham — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:53:04 +0000

In the aftermath of the Community Languages Online report I’ve had time to start teasing out my thoughts on web internationalisation and accessibility as it applies to government information in community languages.

Web accessibility is well entrenched in federal and state governments’ web standards in Australia. Generally web developers understand the need for web accessibility. Government departments and agencies require web accessibility and will make the effort to get their websites to comply with accessibility standards.

This seems to work smoothly in monolingual environments, but there is a fracture point. Looking at Australian government websites, it becomes apparent that key aspects of web accessibility (and its relationship with web internationalisation) is only superficially understood.

In a future post I’ll discuss two particular federal government websites. For the moment I’ll concentrate on my understanding of web accessibility as it applies to content in community languages.

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Looking forward … SE Asian scripts support

Andrew Cunningham — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 07:35:08 +0000

A number of changes to the Myanmar script and proposed support for additional South east Asian support are in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode pipelines over the next year or two.

Andrew West provides a very good summary of what will be in Unicode 5.1 in his post What’s new in Unicode 5.1 ?.

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The Myanmar script and Unicode

Andrew Cunningham — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 05:53:49 +0000

I’ve been looking into Unicode support for the Myanmar Script. A few local projects require Unicode support for Myanmar (Burmese), Mon and S’gaw Karen. The existing Unicode Myanmar block only supports Myanmar (Burmese). Unicode 5.1 will make changes to the existing Myanmar block and add additional characters for Mon and S’gaw Karen. Proposals have been submitted to add additional characters to support other ethnic minority languages of the Myanmar Union.

The following notes attempt to summarize current status of Unicode support for the Myanmar script.

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