The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts

It seems that my post regarding the CVS head on the 770 caused quite a stir when it was linked from one of the blogs on Planet Maemo. Some people were surprised that you can use, for example, Chinese fonts on the device (since Nokia allegedly said that Asian languages would not be supported).

One of the comments there said:

This is further proof that Nokia is a zookeeper who doesn’t understand she’s let the animals out of their cages and they’re headed for the open front gates. The people at Nokia are brilliant, hard-working people but they have built themselves a Perfect Storm and nothing short of a production shutdown is going to stop the 770 and its like from rewriting all the rules about how technology is applied and about the importance of freedom in the application of technology.

If nothing else, this shows serious lack of understanding of what full i18n support means in terms of demand on the system resources. The 770 runs a version of GNU Linux with the gtk toolkit on the top of if, and as such comes with the text processing library Pango. The fact that the library is there, and the fact that AbiWord can use it, does not mean that on the given hardware it will perform adequately. I doubt that Nokia is trying to restrict the way in which people use the device (for goodness sake, if they do, what is maemo about?).

Not everything that commercial companies do is driven by (non-free) ideological reasons — indeed, it is worth taking the free-software ideology glasses off time from time; sometimes the weather out there is not as bad as it seemed.

Just built AbiWord package of today’s CVS head for the 770 to see how the Pango backend performs. Opening the AbiWord World.abw document, the results are fairly impressive, certainly better than I expected. The device does not have the necessary fonts for number of the languages in that document, but Russian, Czech and Greek (even classical Greek) seem to work. So now I have to find out how to get fonts on the device.

For the brave the (unstable) package is here.

UPDATE: TTF and Type1 fonts can be installed on the 770 by simply placing them into /home/user/.fonts/. With suitable Unicode fonts I am getting pretty decent results, except Hebrew (and a few other languages) are not showing at all (I can move through the text, it just is not on screen); curious, because it works on the desktop, perhaps the version of Pango on the 770 needs to be updated.

This weekend I managed to get the Pango backend for AbiWord working, so as of today, it is the default (on *nix, that is). Read the rest »