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Complex Language Support for PDA's?

Posted by Cliff on from the support-for-your-pictograms dept.

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?"

10 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Complex language support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I thought you meant Perl support.

  2. CJKOS by Lemuel · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Right to Left? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    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

  4. I don't know... by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...

  5. Palm OS handles those, but one-at-a-time by bcombee · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  6. Oh for God's sake. . . by Fritz+Benwalla · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Oh for God's sake. . . by Jasin+Natael · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is the highest-modded flamebait, so: the point is that I *have* looked around. The post is "Ask Slashdot" to get some anecdotal responses, or actual experiences back. I'm buying a PDA specifically for its complex language support, gray-market imports aren't an option, and I (and conceivably other /. readers) would like to hear about what works for other people.

      For example, a few things I've found:
      J-OS works on old Palms, but not anything with enough memory to be useful as a dictionary/learning tool. CJKOS doesn't support High-Res of any type and won't be updated for OS5. So much for a long-term solution. The things I've tried for Palm, while useful, are largely OLD freeware projects that crash a lot on the newer revisions of the OS.

      Windows CE machines, while they do support unicode characters natively, need pagecode translation to display more common encodings (I have no experience to draw on... Is this a problem?), and have an abysmal educational software selection.

      Point is: I haven't got the PDA/Smartphone to play with, and would like to hear about peoples' experiences fiddling with the language support of their gadgets before dropping a few hundred bucks on something that may not even work very well at all. I'd also be interested to find out which solutions feel like dirty little hacks, and which are virtually indistinguishable from OS-native support...

      --
      True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
  7. A couple programs by Rob+Simpson · · Score: 5, Informative
    Neopad Nihongo Input Kana
    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.

  8. Zaurus is the bomb by lingqi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Display rendering is very RAM intensive by tlambert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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