One of the serendipitous connections I made recently in Malaysia was with Chantra Be of the KhmerOS project, who are providing a completely localized operating system and applications to computer users in Cambodia, who have never been provided a localized computer operating system in the past.
KhmerOS is based on Open Suse Linux and also ships with a Gecko-based browser called Mekhala and a Gecko-based mail client called Moyura.
Via Chantra, the KhmerOS team is considering whether they might be willing to help Mozilla with a Khmer localization for Firefox and Thunderbird as well. This would be for post 3.5. More information when I have more to share.
What size screens are normal in Cambodia these days?
Khmer text is taller than most other writing systems since it must provide room for multiple marks both above and below the letters.
It looks like a prior Khmer localization effort apparently failed because Mozilla UI leaders
* weren’t willing to accept a redesign for the dialogs (more tabs) so they could display tall Khmer text and still fit on an 800×600 screen common there at the time, and
* weren’t willing to allow scrollbars to appear in dialogs if needed.
(for example, bug 259228, bug 259959).
With the popularity of netbooks, small screens are still likely to be a problem.
A separate branch with redesigned dialogs may still be necessary.
ac, I’m not sure what screen sizes are normal in Cambodia. I’d imagine they’d be similar to what is popular elsewhere?
Regarding the size of Khmer text and compromises in UI, I’m hoping we can look at the issues with fresh eyes as those bugs are quite old and try to find creative solutions.
Realistically, the list of localizations for Firefox 3.5 is basically fixed, so any discussion of a Khmer Firefox would be for a post-3.5 release.
@ac,
I think Khmer and Thai as well as, AFAIK, Gujarati are facing the same problem on text rendering, for example too small room for rendering thai characters in location bar.
To me, supporting those issues are neccessary, but nice to have, sometime. In trem of Thai, we focus on localise, make the more user related things done — page’s wordbreak/rendering, l10n — first, get local people more familiar with it, then go with more tech related issues.
My point is the issue like separate branch and redesign dialog is needed as well, but it shouldn’t drag the user related issue to be fixed, in term of Khmer, i guessed, everything is ready, just put all the Khmer L10n to mozilla to reduce new release catch-up efford for Khmer L10n team, then go for bigger issue, redesign.
Keng.