[dot] KDE/Qt Extension for Traditional Eastern Languages

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1130546299/

From: James Ray <jianwu02 at iscas.cn>
Dept: gone-with-wind
Date: Friday 28/Oct/2005, @19:38

KDE/Qt Extension for Traditional Eastern Languages
==================================================

   A research group in the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy
of Sciences [http://english.cas.cn/Eng2003/page/home.asp] have been
working on an operating system to support traditional Eastern languages
such as Mongolian, Uighur and Tibetan. We have now extended Qt and KDE 3
to support these langages.  Some screenshots show the scripts in use
[http://159.226.5.82/~ruijw/MongolianSystem.html] (mirror)
[http://kubuntu.org/~jr/dot/MongolianSystem/]. Any comments are welcome.

     This work is against KDE 3.4/Qt 3.3.2. To support these minority
scripts, the following things have been done:

    * QPainter text drawing routines have been extended to support
      top-top-bottom left-top-right and top-to-bottom right-to-left
      directions. We consider it imperative that QPainter can adapt to
      the major scripts in the world.
    * Some script engines have been added.
    * Widget interfaces have been extended to satisfy the requirements
      of different scripts. As the screenshots show, all widgets can be
      rotated for vertical scripts.  We have also made some
      modifications to better support widget presentation in reverse
      mode.

     Each language script has its own features. For example, traditional
Mongolian is written vertically from top to bottom in columns advancing
from left to right and the letters always change their shapes depending
on different conditions. Thus Qt's text engine and widgets have to be
extended to satisfy the requirement of an operating system to supporting
these minority languages.

     We have completed the largest part of this work, but it is not yet
finished. Our engineers are still working on Qt and KDE Libs. We have
also been working on Konqueror which will be extended to meet some of
the extra features from CSS3.