In the comments on our editorial about language purism and the Psystar case, it became quite clear that language is a subject almost everyone has an opinion on - not odd if you consider that language is at the very centre of what makes us "human". Since this appears to be a popular subject, let's talk about the influence computing has had on two very minor aspects of the Dutch language.
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Member since:2008-01-07
You have to understand that majority of my friends (indians) are laymen using XP loaded PC's. In other words majority if not all would get around searching for fonts or learning keyboard layouts they can't feel on QWERTY. Getting the indic font rendering to work in XP means that you needed the original CD, which is a joke in third-world countries anyway.
As for myself, I use Linux, XP, Vista, Win7, Mac OS X and Haiku. But the deal is that when I'm chatting with my friends the fonts are either absent or they're transformed into weird letters.
Do note that the indic keyboards is also an important issue here. Most of the software that render indic scripts can't be integrated and thus are rarely used. I tried using a AHK script to use IAST (which means that I'd just have to rely on good ol' QWERTY) but it gets changed to an unreadable font.
I'll admit that it's been a while since I started doing it again, but I don't recall Arial Unicode to be installed by default on XP systems (I believe it comes with Office?) and Yahoo Messenger turns the IAST into unreadable mess..
Member since:
2005-07-06
Seriously? I may not be able to type it, or understand it, but I searched (google) around for enough Indic fonts to be able to view the various blocks in Unicode.
What OS do you use?