[CREATE] unicode reference lib

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

Письмо про алфавиты в CREATE

Hi,

Recently a Glyphs dialog was added to Inkscape for easier special
characters insertion. While it certainly is a good thing, there is one
issue I'd like to discuss.

There are five applications I can name off-top of my head that list
translatable Unicode blocks:

- Gucharmap
- FontForge
- Fontmatrix
- Inkscape
- Scribus

But they do not always agree on naming of blocks. E.g. where FontForge
has "Yi syllables and radicals", Inkscape has "Yi syllables" and "Yi
radicals" separately, and so on. I happen to translate four out of
five these applications (except Gucharmap) and I feel PITA growing
despite of using translation memory.

Therefore several questions:

1. Is it possible to create a library that would provide a centralized
localizable list of Unicode blocks always matching the current Unicode
specification?

2. Or is there a library that could be adapted to solve this issue?

3. Or is there an existing solution that simply isn't acknowledged by
developers?

4. Would such a list work for any application, be it C/GTK+/gettext or
C++/Qt/TS-QM?

I have a suspicion that OpenOffice.org, KOffice and Abiword/Gnumeric
also have some kind of special characters dialog and would benefit
from such a solution.

Opinions?

P.S. Of course as non-developer I'm merely speculating instead of
bloody doing the job :)

Alexandre