Translate.org.za Development Blog

When we added the extra Venda characters, ḓṱḽṋṅ, to the DejaVu font we were newbies.  Needless to say the diacritics didn’t all line up correctly.  Ouch.  This looked really bad when viewed in large sizes when doing a demo.

At a recent conference Dwayne met with Denis Jacquerye, a DejaVu font contributor.  He volunteered to fix the problem and those fixes appeared in r1626 and r1627.  These should appear in DejaVu 2.16, which is scheduled to be released on 1 April.

We’re still not official and are still in beta. The biggest problem that we are aware of is that our dialogue sizes are still wrong in some places. Yes it sucks in that we have to manually change these and retest and Mozilla seems unable to work this out itself as other toolkits do

But you can get the release and it should magically upgrade if you installed 2.0.0.2. Please help us identify any dialogues that are not the correct size so that we can correc them and that hopefully we’ll see 2.0.0.4 being the official release of Firefox in Afrikaans.

Download 2.0.0.3 in Afrikaans for Windows, Linux or Mac.

A fully localised computer lab, including the state of the art translations available for all 11 South African languages, has recently been set up at Rhodes University. This was an initiative within the SANTED (South African - Norwegian Tertiary Education Development) Programme in the School of Languages (African Languages Section), in collaboration with the Telkom Centre of Excellence in the Department of Computer Science.

The lab, hosted by the School of Languages, counts 30 machines, all dual-boot Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, of course). It features most of the software developed by Translate and hosted at http://downloads.translate.org.za. This includes all available localisations for OpenOffice, FireFox and Thunderbird, as well as spell-checkers for all languages and the SA keyboard. With the help of Friedel and Andrew (Rhodes IT) we also created nice shortcuts to switch language for OpenOffice in Windows. On the Linux side, Gnome is available in Afrikaans, Sesotho sa Leboa, isiXhosa and isiZulu.

This is the first computer lab at a South African tertiary institution to allow students to operate computers almost entirely in their language. We really hope to see similar initiatives springing up at other institutions.

What does this mean for you?  We’re not sure ourselves!  We use the orthography files from fontconfig in a small tool used by the Deja Vu font team that can analyse a font to arrive at a percentage coverage for various languages. With this tool we can quickly check if a font covers Afrikaans, Venda, Tswana and Northern Sotho.

Our guess is that font-config itself uses these orthography files in its algorithm for font substitution.  For instance if a font does not have Venda characters it can find a font that does cover the Venda characters and use that for the missing glyphs.

In our bug report we added some missing South African languages and fixed the entry for Tswana which didn’t include the Šš characters.