Holizz versus the Web

Well my coursework is going very well. The application is complete. The specification said I should add an appropriate feature. So I internationalised it. It comes with British English (en_GB.utf8) and Japanese Japanese (ja_JP.utf8) locales.

It was fun learning new things about Java (which I am really starting to like… it’ll be Open Source soon, then I can install it). I learnt about Locale, ResourceBundle, Class.getResourceAsStream(…).

While writing the documentation I discovered that neither AbiWord nor OpenOffice.org Writer (I haven’t tried kword because SCIM and Qt don’t get on and I’ll be damned if I’m going to use a word processor that doesn’t let me type in my language of chioce) will consult another font if a glyph isn’t found (which appears to be what pretty much every other piece of GUI software does by default). Say the default font is Kochi Gothic (東風ゴシック), ASCII, Hiragana, Katakana, Han, and Ideographic Punctuation will be available. Say you then wanted to insert a â„– (U+2116 NUMERO SIGN) - you could in any half-decent modern piece of software, but oh no, not in AbiWord. It just appears as what appears to be a ° (U+00B0 DEGREE SIGN). In OpenOffice.org Writer it appears as what looks like a (U+0020 SPACE). GTK+, Qt, Gecko, X (or whatever renders xterm and such) can all handle it. Why are these word processors stuck in the olden days of … I don’t know, I’m too young to remember those days.

Speaking of pathetic software, I’m currently on a quest to find a social networking site that doesn’t reject Japanese text. Myspace, Xuqa, and Vampirefreaks apparently suck, and a Japanese site I found was invite-only.

P.S. You know when you’ve been watching too much anime studying too much Japanese when you have to log into a system where you haven’t set your locale to ja_JP.utf8 to find out the English for ８月.