Product SiteDocumentation Site

3.4. Internationalization

This section includes information on language support in Fedora.

3.4.1. IBus

IBus (Intelligent Input Bus) is an input framework for Linux that provides a full-featured and user-friendly user interface for input methods. Updates to IBus in Fedora 13 include:
  • IBus now supports a global shared input method mode for all applications: the default is still to use separate contexts.
  • IBus supports to show languagebar in status icon menu.
  • ibus-pinyin engine has been reimplemented in C++ with improved performance of fuzzy pinyin.
  • New ibus-fbterm package provides IBus support in the fbterm framebuffer console.
  • ibus-hangul engine now supports Romaja style input for Western users.
  • ibus-table-quick was merged into ibus-table-cangjie, and new tables added for Smart Cangjie 6, Quick (classic), and Easy (Big).
  • ibus-anthy supports the preferences of symbol style and conversion mode.
  • ibus-anthy supports Thumb Shift NICOLA-J, NICOLA-F and NICOLA-A layouts.
  • ibus-anthy supports the dictionary customization of the default personal dictionary and extended personal dictionaries.

3.4.2. New Chinese font

The default font for Simplified Chinese is now WQY Zenhei.

3.4.3. Lohit Devanagari

The new Lohit Devanagari font replaces the previous separate Lohit fonts for Hindi, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, and Nepali. Any distinct glyphs for these languages needed in the future can be handled in Lohit Devanagari with Open Type Font locl tags.

3.4.4. Automatic installation of language packs

A number of large suite-type packages, such as OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, and KDE, package their translated content separately as langpacks due to size issues. Now with the langpack plugin, when yum detects that a langpack is needed and available for a package the user requests, yum automatically downloads and installs the langpack as well. The user no longer needs to specifically request installation of language support for these types of suites. In the future it will be possible to extend this support further throughout the distribution. Refer to http://dingyichen.livejournal.com/17133.html for details.

3.4.5. Glibc Locales and Collation

The following locales for glibc (the GNU C Library) have been added or updated in Fedora 13:
  • kok_IN (Konkani Language locale for India: around 3.6 million speakers) for Devanagari script added.
  • ps_AF (Pashto Language locale for Afghanistan: around 35.5 million speakers) added.
  • collation for Tamil and Assamese is now available in all locales.