A rant about localization [modified]
-
Cheap LCD panels are not graphics, they are resticted to (for example) 2 rows of 16 columns of text. These cost a couple of quid - graphics capable panels start at £40 - £50 and need more complex RAM, controllers and software to support them. When the production cost of your complete electronics is £80 or less then this becomes a significant part of the unit cost.
No trees were harmed in the sending of this message; however, a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced. This message is made of fully recyclable Zeros and Ones
Totally forgot that LCDs also contain the Row & Column variety. Oh my eternal shame!
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
-
Hi everyone I must thank you for picking up this subject. I myself develop for multi-directional solutions. i must state that microsft in the last couple of years has taken the .net framework very much forward, as far as localization is concerned. #1 the ide itself is totally unicode/bidirectional (though sometimes u need to save as...) #2 asp.net, being html based, can easily make sites that cater for rtl and ltr languages, i just change the dir of the main form at login/app start (i just didnt know there were so many rtl languages!!!) #3 you have calendars for jewish dates/muslim dates and more. very important, cause "next year" is different depending in which calendar youre referring to i do find though that adobe , even though incorporating full unicode support, does not, standardly, support bi-directional. that you get only with the more-expensive winsoft/me version. all in all, when considering the nightmares bi-directional gave us in the early 90's, i really do thing that ms (and probably other vendors as well) deserve kudos for being so culture-friendly. being that most apps developed today are web-based, i think youre really ppretty-much covered if you use asp.net. even though i found a bug when trying to add a "yi" resource file (for yiddish) to a asp.net solution. i hope the bug will be fixed asap.
Hijri calendars is another whole rant on its own :) We've never managed to get something working with the OS built-in versions as it's not a straight fixed conversion from Gregorian. (Well actually it is, but the Saudis and others like to tinker with it depending on actual manual moon sightings etc.) For display and data entry purposes we have always ended up building our own conversion table that the user can tweak as required. The OS version can be used to generate the 'default' conversion, but there will always be some client who disagrees with it or wants to change it retrospectively. We've even had different departments in the same client company implementing different conversions.
JustAStupidGurl
