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Complex Language Support for PDA's?
Jasin Natael asks: "What PDA's/Smartphones, etc. support complex languages in addition to more 'standard' languages? I'm a student of Japanese and am looking for a new PDA or smartphone that operates in English, but supports complex character sets. Input is a plus, but it's really needed for Contacts, Notes, Websites, and incoming E-Mail at a minimum. Would it be easy to add support to a Linux PDA (Zaurus) or Pocket PC for this? What about right-to-left languages, like Hebrew and Arabic?"
I'm pretty sure you can get J2ME to run on almost anything...and it uses Unicode, so would it qualify as a "complex" language, appropriate for requested uses?
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
That would be Pippy, Python for the Palm OS; Python-CE
I know that's the unintended way to take an ambiguous question (ignoring the fact that python is "versatile" and "powerful" but not really "complex" - although you can certainly build complex tools with it), but this is a serious answer.
You can get one of the phone versions of the WinCE devices (my brother has the Siemens one - nice device). I have a Toshiba (WinCE without phone). The OS is unicode based (lots of ascii functions are actually missing in the APIs). There are ports of lots of good "traditionally unix" tools at http://www.rainer-keuchel.de/software.html. You can see some of the I18N stuff done with Tcl/Tk on CE and general Tcl/Tk on CE info. Perl/Tk also exists, along with lots of other goodies, at Rainer's site.
The reason that I purchased a WinCE device over Palm was because of all the more fun hack potential.
Well I have an Agenda VR3(www.softfield.com) and I've recently felt a similar need. Although I haven't tried to make it all work yet, but I don't think it should be that hard - it's running a standard XFree so I'll just need to put the fonts in the right place...I'm not sure about Zaurus, but I don't think that getting cjk fonts to work should be a big problem. As for input - can you use the onscreen keyboard with kinput2 or something like that? :) Oh, but kinput2 needs the locale to be set accordingly too, doesn't it? :(
Zaurus must be *THE* only PDA that includes kanji input - as in, written by hand. (Okay so you can write kana into it too, so it's more like "glyph input" but I digress)
You have no idea how that saves your life (or, time - which is really just small chunks of life) when looking for the pronouciation of some kanji characters (and meanings - zaurus in Japan AFAIK comes with dictionaries either direction).
So, yeah - buy a zaurus from Japan and be amazed. I don't think the US models are so trick, buc I might be wrong.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Yo, Nokia Communicator has a asian language version available, plus the phone issuper-sweet. You can play MPEG movies on it as well as do powerpoint. (tiny keys though)
Sony has been making asian language Clies on the PalmOS for years. And ANY Palm can use CJKOS(Chinese, Japanese, Korean Operating System) which is exactly what you need. Sorry for having you be in the dark for so long. I mean, it's darn near the most popular file at PalmGear.com, the 2nd leading Palm site to Handango.
Next time use google instead of wasting space on the front page.
Display rendering is very RAM intensive. It is particularly costly for these small devices.
For a 32,000 character Japanese or Chinese font, at 14 pixels square (about the smallest readable resolution), un compressed, you are talking about 800K.
On an 8M Palm, that ends up being 1/10th of your available memory.
Hebrew, Arabic, Tamil, Devengari, or other ligatured languages have much smaller fonts, but since the character rendering changes as a result of which characters are adjavent to each other, or the start or end of the line, you have similar memory constraints for the ligature rendering software, which could be considered "part of" the font.
That's just for display, and doesn't include input.
For something like Pinjin (Chineseh input) or Kanjihand (Japanese input), you are talking additional RAM taken up to allow both "chording", and translation of the pseudo "chords" (unless you have a keyboard) into the textual representation.
Storage for data is less of a problem; but most storage uses EUC or UTF or some other multibyte encoding. If it didn't, you couldn't shove it into 8-bit "files" on a PALM; if PALM supported 16-bit "files", this would be much easier.
But since it doesn't, you don't get the average 2.5:1 information density increase you would normally get from an ideogrammatic language (average English word length is 5 8-bit characters), and it drops down to about equal density (~1.2:1), so you don't win back your memory used on input and display processing that way.
So the net result is about the same as the original Macintosh: all the RAM is taken up by system processing, leaving nothing left for data or programs.
So what this boils down to is that the support has to be built into the OS area, instead of into the user area.
About the only PALM-like device I know that can do this is the Sharp Zarus. All the other vendors tend to fill their FLASH up with, well, pieces of PalmOS, not leaving any private-use areas for language add-on vendors.
PS: Yes, I know my font size of ~800K is uncompressed; the alternative is to compress it, and then include decompression code. That sort of works, but is compute intensive enough to make the system unpleasent to use, with the underpowered processors on most PDAs.
-- Terry
I'd like to point out that the Japanese people write in 3 different alphabetics. They are katakana, hiragana and kanji.
Kanji is the "defaul" alphabetic. It's done the chinese way, so each letter represents a whole word.
Hiragana is then a "backup alphabetic" with each letter meaning one syllable, for example ka, ke, ki, ko, ku, tsu, chi, n, a, e, to, te.
Hiragana is used when the writer doesn't know the right kanji letter for the word he wants to write or when there isn't such kanji letter at all.
Katakana is the alphabetic Japanese people use when they want express words taken from foreign languages. I guess you can guess what means "printo piipir", which reads in the side of a box filled with unused paper.. BTW, Japanese people seem to love using unchanged English words in their language. Most of the text written in katakana is in fact English written the Japanese way and can therefore be understood by anyone who has a bit of imagination and can speak English.
(Imagination, because the words change a bit because katakana isn't about writing the word sound by sound but syllable by syllable. For example my name, Tuukka Ryyppö, turns into "Tsuukka Riuppo" when written in katakana)
Where have your banknotes been?!