Word processor simplifies bilingual publishing
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(InfoWorld) - AÂ word processor developed by the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and based on OpenOffice.org 2.0 could make life easier for bilingual communities around the world. The translation software, Agored,Â which means open in Welsh, contains prominent buttons to switch the language of the user interface between English and Welsh. Similar buttons change the language used by the spelling checker, either for the whole document or for one paragraph. There's already a Welsh-language version of OpenOffice, but the application interface only shows one language at a time, and changing it involves delving into the menus. Much of the bilingual functionality that Agored adds to the interface is already present in OpenOffice, but not readily accessible, said David Chan, a programmer who worked on the project. Agored makes it easier for users to sit down in front of a computer and switch the application to their strongest language, he said. Wales, one of the four constituent nations of the U.K., has two official languages with equal status, Welsh and English, and local government bodies and other public organizations must issue documents in both languages. Almost one in four of the country's 2.8 million inhabitants speak, read or write Welsh, according to the latest national census , but there are few exclusively Welsh-speaking communities left. "Those people need bilingual software, not Welsh software," Chan said. In addition to the coding, a lot of work went into the translation of Agored's menu items, dialogs and numerous help files -- around half a million words in all, according to Diarmuid Johnson, who worked on the translation. The University of Wales at Aberystwyth developed Agored with funding from the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh public television channel S4C and the Welsh Language Board. Some of the computer-related terms had already been defined by the Welsh Language Board in a joint project with Microsoft Corp. in 2004 that led to the creation of a Welsh language interface pack for Office 2003 , Johnson said. In the three days following Agored's release on Nov. 16, it was downloaded 200 times, Chan said. The functions that Agored adds to OpenOffice could interest many more people than that, though. Chan said the project team took care to make their code changes useful to other bilingual communities, groups that could include speakers of English and Irish Gaelic in Ireland; of French and Dutch in the Belgian capital of Brussels; of French and German in Switzerland, and of Basque and Spanish or of Catalan and Spanish in Spain. Chan said he had already been contacted by Catalan speakers during Agored's development. Speakers of Catalan and Welsh have another IT interest in common: Internet top-level domains (TLDs) to promote their languages and cultures. Domain name registry FundaciÃ³ puntCAT won approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create the dot-cat TLD for the Catalan linguistic and cultural community in September 2005. One year later, FundaciÃ³ puntCAT said it had registered 17,500 dot-cat domains. Inspired by the Catalan success, a Welsh group has launched a campaign for a Welsh TLD , dot-cym. (The y in cym rhymes with the "u" in "put" or the "oo" in "hood.") The campaigners hope that dot-cym will stimulate the use of Welsh on the Web in the same way that the creation of the dot-cat TLD led to the creation of sites written in the Catalan language. Earlier this month, members of the National Assembly of Wales voted to support the dot-cym campaign.
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Raw image editing and cataloging software gets support for Windows Vista and Adobe file formats.
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PHPBuilder.com has a review posted today of a piece of PHP development software - RapidPHP 2007:   Of the many editors available for creating (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP pages, several combine a few different yet compatible languages. Some include support and a few manage to make it work seamlessly. RapidPHP 2007 belongs in the latter category.   They walk through the list of features (including a PHP syntax checker) and include a screenshot of the PHP function hints in action. The reviewer also talks about the support for other languages it has - the (X)HTML editor and CSS style sheet editor.
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Gerd Schauffelberger introduces a new package today as a part of his work with the pat-tools group - the patI18n package for internationalization.   In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.   He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.
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Responding to requests, Microsoft will sponsor open-source project to build translators between older office formats and Open XML.
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The new sites â in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Dutch â will feature local language home pages.
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While Altavista has largely disappeared from the minds of most Internet users since the emergence of Google, the Web property does still have a very popular service: its Babel Fish translator. Now, Microsoft is testing its own translation offering under the Windows Live umbrella.
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InfoWorld - Companies have completed the first phase of a Microsoft-sponsored project to create software that can convert Microsoft Word documents between Open XML and Open Document Format for Office Applications file formats.
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New PostScript RIP gives designers more options in output formats.
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InfoWorld - Sun&#160;has created software that will provide translation between the file format in Microsoft&#39;s Office 2003 suite and ODF (Open Document Format for XML). The plug-in lets people who use computers with assistive technologies to access documents written in ODF.
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In response, Adobe releases a new version of both Acrobat and Reader.
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Blog: TypePad gets improved publishing features. Movable Type gets community and goes open source.
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Corel has released a free public beta of WordPerfect Lightning, a word processor that blends a desktop-based application with online features.
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Device features more storage, improved handwriting recognition.
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This innovative software gets students excited about words - improving reading, writing, and communication skills. Search results are presented in thought-provoking Thinkmap visual display.
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Another book publisher makes inroads toward the digital side of content.
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An increasing number of American parents want their children to be bilingual if not multilingual.