In Nomine - The Lotus Land

The typesetting and webdesign industry has apparently been using the ‘lorem ipsum’ text for a while to provide a dummy text in order to test print and layout.

Aside from the fact that the text is a cut off section of Cicero’s de finibus bonorum et malorum, it also fails in one huge aspect, namely globalisation.

The text is Latin, latin is the simplest of all characters we have available to us on the world-wide web. If your website is English only then, yes, you are quite done. However for a lot of us we also have to support languages other than English, the easiest of which are Latin-derived scripts.

Latin, and subsequently English, are both written left-to-right. Hebrew and Arabic, to take two prime examples, are written right-to-left (leaving numerals aside for the moment). Of course, this is very important to also test since it means a lot of change is needed for your lay out.

Especially when testing your design for sites that need to display multiple languages on the same page it is pertinent to test with multilingual text. One of the things that should quickly become clear is whether or not a sufficient encoding has been chosen.

So I was updating my input method editors (IME) from the default in Windows x64 (IME 2002) to the ones provided by Office 2007’s language packs. As explained in a previous post of mine you can install the proofing tools and input by passing LAUNCHEDBYSETUPEXE=1 to the execution of the MSI. Now, on my Windows x64 I installed the IME by installing the IME64.MSI with this added variable. The weird thing was that some applications worked flawlessly and yet others showed me the wrong number of icons or no icons at all! It turns out that these applications are 32-bits applications and need to have the 32-bits IME installed as well. So next to installing IME64.MSI of the language you want to install, you will also have to install IME32.MSI. Only after doing this will you notice the applications working as you want them.

Thinking back on it, it makes perfect sense, but while you are in the middle of working with it you keep wondering: “why?”

So I have been toying with the proofing tools and input method editors (IME) from Office 2007. The issue with the single language packs is that you cannot just group the entire stuff together.

Also trying to run the MSIs from the individual directories for the proofing tools or the IMEs greets you with an ‘Error 1713′. On the other hand, if you run the MSI from the command prompt and passing along LAUNCHEDBYSETUPEXE=1 as an argument it will install. Curious.

ZSH in its released forms has no support at all for use of Unicode. In the CVS there are some changes to making this work as it should.
Which means finally able to use Nihongo on the command line. Yay.

Weird that one has to twiddle Window Maker to support multibyte.

You need to edit $HOME/GNUstep/Defaults/WMGLOBAL and $HOME/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker and add MultiByteText = Yes; to the contents of the file.

Received two books yesterday:

Donald Knuth’s volume 3 of the Art of Computer Programming (Sorting and Searching) and
Ken Lunde’s CJKV Information Processing.

Donald Knuth’s volume 2 should be coming my way next week.