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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 thought you meant Perl support.
I use CJKOS on my Clie to give me Chinese characters, both for input as well as display in applications. It includes Japanese fonts but I have never used them. It works quite well for me.
I'm taking an Automata and Formal Languages class, and at first I thought this said "Context-Free Language support for PDA's" (a PDA is a push-down automata). And I thought, "aren't they already equivalent?"
Just make the characters upside down and turn the PDA upside down. That will make them work right to left.
Easily Fixed.. Where is my million dollars?
Give me a Job... Resume is at http://www.newberrycollege.net
I'm CERTAIN that a few months back I came across a Japanese package for the Palm. Maybe on Palm Freeware? That's the only Palm site I visit regularly so it could be there...
Buy an imported PDA and get full language support. I have yet to see any computer that didn't have some english support.
Palm OS is officially available in English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portugese, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese, and there are translation modules to support Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Hebrew, Greek, and more. Usually, a device is only set for one language at a time, but some of the overlay programs allow for an Asian language and Engligh together.
A few choice URLs:
http://www.penreader.com/PalmOS/PiLoc.html
Hebrew Localization
Chinese OS for Palm OS
Why are you even considering the world editions of the Zaurus? The Japanese models have full support for Japanese chars, plus nice dictionaries. But these models are sold only inside Japan (or through gray market), the world models don't have equivalent features.
Those blue screens of death are so cryptic, you can take them to be any language you want.
Another problem solved.
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" ----------
Uh-huh. Gotta love the "if it's popular it must be good" argument. Kinda like the way some idiots argue, "other OS's suck. Use Windows. There is a reason most people use Windows..." Oh and then there's that pesky fact about how the majority of the planet that doesn't speak English.
Sorry to be a bastard about this, but please don't use Ask Slashdot for a simple request that takes two seconds to look up on Google.
The VERY FIRST response on Google is a very complete PowerPoint presentation comparing various plugins for complex language support including Chinese and Japanese, and there were a bunch of useful links from there.
Ask Slashdot should be reserved for important things, like whether Go rulez more than Chess, or endless speculation on who will play the Empire State Building in the new Peter Jackson version of King Kong
------
Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
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.
Arabic is available here: http://www.arabicpalm.com/ and Hebrew here: http://www.penticon.com/.
I would be interested to find out if any work has been done to get either of these languages workin on the Zaurus.
Simputer from India has support for the complex Indic languages.
However, for Japanese and Arabic (with bidi support), I guess the best option would be to run gtk2 - whose pango text layout engine supports complex scripts.
I don't know what PDA has gtk2 based apps, you'll have to find out for yourself.
I don't see any reason why pda's or smartphones won't have this kind of language support.
Hm, after a quick search on the palm os site I found this palm os page
A quote:
I suppose it's not that hard to find plugins for other languages.
When I was in Japan, I saw a ton of Japanese based pda's. It's much easier for them to support english than for US to support japanese..!
:)
Palm has one and so does Zaurus (in fact, they have many models).
Oh and BTW, they are much more cooler than the US models
-- Leeeter than leet
"chinese language support palm pilot" yields a power point presentation that compares both chinese and japanese plug ins.
"japanese language PDA" the first entry is a press release on a whole japanese language system for symbian os.
Google = not hard.
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
The Danger Hiptop / T-Mobile Sidekick looks like it will have Japanese IME support, at least as a developer tool.
Neopad Nihongo Input Romazi
I haven't tried either of the above, though...
Also, the program Dokusha, while also being a good English-Japanese dictionary, comes with some Japanese fonts.
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.
I bought my PI-6500 6 years ago. It has handwriting recognition, wa-ei, ei-wa, kanji and kokugo dictionaries built-in. The handwriting recognition comes in handy when you want to look-up a kanji you don't know. It is also good practice for handwriting skills. The latest zaurus-es have these, but you used ones are really cheap in akihabara (50 bucks or less). You also might be interested in http://www.jisyo.org if you are serious about japanese study.
But its a shame you Americans cant speak it, you cant even spell things correct....
repeat after me...
colour
armour
catalogue
Aluminium (Al - you - min - i - um)
Simon
dont get on your high horses this is called humour
Kingdom of Loathing (www.kingdomofloathing.com) Addicted is me
Then set the locale to English and modify the fonts as described at this site . This gives you English Menues and English and Japanese input and gets rid of any mojibake in the Japanese applications. The Zaurus has the same handwriting recognition as all its predecessors which is the best I have ever seen for Kana, Kanji and various alphabets all at the same time.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
www.sofmap.co.jp sells clie and an older sharp zaurus (SL-B500, cheaper and also linux, with a chicklet keyboard). I have some older clies which I dislike due to their being entirely too slow for input using normal input methods. The newer clies are nice-looking too, and at least for the older ones there are apparently ways to localize them. I'd stick with linux and as much RAM as you can get though.. the new zaurus would be perfect with a little faster cpu and an extra hundred megabytes or so of ram. Undoubtedly you can run emacs with any language you like on it.
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 don't quite get your question, really. The japanese had PDAs before we did, and they've *allways* had better ones. Especially due to their set of glyphs!
They've also got wristwatch computers and use them in ways useful. Mostly 'cause you get a lot more info on that tiny screen with Kanji and Chinese Symbols than with latin lettering. You can get an entire novel on to something like 100 pages that way.
Go figure.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Here is an excerpt from the Discussion over at brighthand on this, I followed it and had no problems with installing japanese support on a Dell Axim, Ipaq 3650, and Ipaq 5450
Here is the page
"It seems that some of you want to see and Input Japanese on their US/EUR PPC
here you are all you need and a Step by step process Enjoy!
Fisrt of all you don't need to flash the rom of your PPC, I was obliged to do that on my Japanese Ipaq just simply coz I was fed up to not be able to run some software properly and to wait for Rom Update.
What you need is very simple:
-The Japanese FONT MSGothic From a Japanese PPC
-A file called wince.nls from a Japanese PPC
-2 reg keys
-TascalRegedit soft in order to import those key.
Please not that you will only be able to read Japanese not Input Japanese
By reading I mean that you can even see the Kanji of a Japanese soft installed on a US/EUR PPC and of course surf the web in Japanese.
By not be able to imput Japanese I mean that you can no write in Japanese for that you need to buy a Japanese Input software and as well import some Key in the registry (can give you more details if you Need)
Finally I am not the guy who created this and all the Info are comming form Pocketgames Japan (Thanks Koji !)
And It has been working perfectly on Compaq/HP (3630 1910 3970 5450) or O2 devices but almost destroyed a Casio E-200 (Hard reset Manipulation was even not successful, was obliged to put away both backup battery and main battery in order to be able to use again the PDA)
so you can Dl the files there:
The reg keys (2)
Reg Key
The Font (2.2Mo zipped and 4Mo unzipped)
Japanese Font
The WinCe.nls
Wince.nls
Thru Active Sync overwrite the wince.nls file which is in your Windows folder, put there as well the Font Don't put neither the wince.nls file nor the font in any other place, folder subfolder than the WINDOWS folder.
Now form TascalRegedit Install the 2 Regkey, soft reset Et voila !!!
to make sure go into my regional settings and you should see that:
Now you can read japanese, so what about inputing Japanese?
This is not the most perfect input methode but this Methode is FREE !
Now you just have to download this soft called POBox, and you will have a New Keyborad available in your PPC. Also in the Zip file you will find a folder called Dic, just put this folder in the C: root of your PPC et voila ! it will works like a charm
(There are some bugs, I mean that the imput panel overlap the dictionary but if you know your Knaji you will recognized them easily)
14/03/03 Update on the Overlaping Problem
Thank you very much for Koji of the Famous and extremly well known Pocketgames JAPAN and Have a look to the link above !
He got the answer of the overlaping problem when using the Soft ComPOBox, you need in the registry to change one single value and you will fix the PB. here you are
in
[HKEY_CURRENT_USERControlPanelSip]
You have
MenuBarHight 0000001a
So now change it to
00000000
Enjoy"
moo.