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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.
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
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Believe me, I'm as surprised by my comment as you are.
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.
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.
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