DoudouLinux CD

Actually ibus-table also doesn't fulfil Burmese Language's nature. In our language, written order and storage order is very different. Some character need to move forward three or four charachters when saving. So we need special IME to move those characters when typing and saving in document. http://code.google.com/p/keymagic/source/checkout is one and only opensoure IME for Burmese Language's complex reordering and position. But it has some memory usage issues.
To avoide complex reordering, Ayar font use non-standard encoding. So Ayar font's storage order is the same as written order. I will use Ayar font when I translating doudoulinux. But before final release of doudoulinux Myanmar package. Let me know which font and IME will be used in doudoulinux release CD as default. I will convert font I used when translating to the font you will include in release CD.

I understand in your latest message that the simplest thing we can do is to use the Ayar font and the ibus input method with the correct table. As the source code is easily available for both, making Debian packages should not be a problem. Tell me if I misunderstood something.

How should the consoles TTY1-TTY6 be configured? With an US keyboard?

A dailybuild CD is available to test the language environment:

http://download.doudoulinux.org/dailybuild/

Please give it a try and tell me what to improve.

I have downloaded and tested it. I found out that some translation is included in iso build. If you are taken those translation from launchpad. It is written in Myanmar3. Doudoulinux's system default font is now zawgyi-one. So words are not display correctly. Some translation has spelling error. As I said previously, ibus table also cannot fulfil the requirement of Burmese language writing system. Current xkeyboard layout is outdated. We don't use that layout since more than a decade. I will develop a new xkeyboard layout.
For character repositioning problem, I think changing some open-type rules in Ayar font will solve. I'm talking about it with Ayar Unicode group. If everything goes well, we will get a specially crafted font for doudoulinux. I'm planning to use doudoulinux in font name and font family. i.e ( Ayar Doudoulinux) Is it allow to use Doudoulinux name ?
Console should use US keyboard.
regards ,
Sithu

Ok, good news.

Concerning the existing translations, they come from original Debian packages. They aren't on Transifex so I believe these are system components that have never needed further translation for DoudouLinux. I have to analyse the MO files in /usr/share/locale/ to find out what packages are concerned. I should probably put these packages on Transifex afterward, in case other languages are concerned too.

Concerning fonts, I've just installed in the CD the package with the 3 fonts. I don't know how to change the default font yet, maybe we've already encountered this issue with Chinese but I'm not sure. If you have information, please tell me. I can also build a package with only the Ayar font to avoid the problem, especially if other fonts are not compatible with both file encoding and input method.

Concerning ibus and keyboard layout, it's great if you find the time to develop a modern keyboard layout. However I still not understand if you'll get something fully satifying in the end or will still be blocked in some way by the ibus internal design. Currently I prefer not use Keymagic since you noticed memory issues. I'm not sure also of how well it integrates in our environment since this is not a package maintained upstream by Debian.

Finally concerning an improved version of the font Ayar, no problem to use the name DoudouLinux for the font. It's just the contrary! It will show your involvement in our project and our interest in having DoudouLinux in the greatest number of languages as possible. Why would we want more? :)

Thanks for your motivation.

Regards,
JM.

The existing Burmese messages of the first CD built seem to come from the Debian package “libgtk2.0-common”. I'll extract its PO files and will probably make a new Transifex resource from it. The package page:

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/libgtk2.0-common

The way I know to set system default font is .fonts.conf in user home directory. I have discussed with Ayar Unicode Group about open-type rules. They agree to provide all source code for my own development and if they can spare time, they will develop it for doudoulinux system. Since we can get special font to follow writing method, we don't need ibus table. we can use xkeyboard. We only need to change /usr/share/X11/xkb/evdev.xml and put some xkb symbols files in /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols.

Best Regards,
Sithu

Sounds good! If you can work with the Ayar Unicode Group, we should get exactly what we need for Burmese, great. You'll just have to provide me the files when they'll be ready for test and I'll package them to build a test CD. I think we'll then have to contact the Xorg team to get your work included upstream.

NB: the exact path for evdev.xml is /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/evdev.xml in Ubuntu, so should be the same in Debian and DoudouLinux.

I've also searched in the directory /etc/fonts/ using the information you gave and found out we just have to put an Xml file into /etc/fonts/conf.d/ to set the font for the whole system. This reminded me that this was for Telugu that we had this issue, not Chinese. So I can easily retrieve how to do this :).

I've created the resource Gtk20 on Transifex:

https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/doudoulinux/resource/gtk20/

You'll be able to download the current Burmese translations and convert them into Ayar.