Historical figure
Lin Chear
Lin Chear is a Canadian engineer of Khmer origin who added support for the Khmer script to Pango, the text layout library of the GNOME desktop for Linux.[1] He also helped add Khmer support to KDE and patched the Mozilla browser to run in Khmer on Linux. His work is part of the history of Khmer script in computing.[1]
Pango
GNOME is a free graphical desktop for Linux. A 2005 United Nations Development Programme primer on software localization says that Lin Chear began studying Pango and, within a few days, wrote the programs GNOME needed to support Khmer.[1] On December 30, 2003, he told a mailing list of GNOME developers that he had added Khmer support to Pango by adapting its existing module for Indic scripts.[2] In January 2004 he sent a patch for Pango 1.3.1. Khmer, he wrote, shared almost all of the Indic module's code, with small changes.[3]
On January 16, 2004, he announced a second version: a Khmer module for Pango ported from the Khmer support that Lars Knoll had written for Qt. He asked for help in merging it into Pango.[4] The GNOME bug report on Khmer rendering records both of his modules: the first replaced the Indic module, and the second was an independent port of the Qt module.[5] The primer expected Khmer support in version 1.6 of Pango. A Khmer module by Jens Herden and Javier Solá was added to Pango in June 2005.[1][5]
KDE and Mozilla
With his help the European maintainer of Qt wrote the routines that support Khmer in KDE and in other programs that use Qt. He also patched Mozilla with Pango code, so that a version of the browser ran in Khmer on Linux.[1]
Converting old fonts
Lin Chear wrote a tool for text typed in the ABC fonts, an older Khmer font family. The update log of Maurice Bauhahn's Khmer Unicode reference site noted it in February 2004 as a converter from the ABC Khmer encoding to Unicode.[6] The KhmerOS project's ABC and Limon font to Unicode converters, released in 2005, include his original converter among their files.[7]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Anousak Souphavanh and Theppitak Karoonboonyanan, Free/Open Source Software: Localization, UNDP-APDIP and IOSN (2005), Khmer case study
- ↑ Lin Chear, "Pango Khmer", gtk-i18n-list (December 30, 2003)
- ↑ Lin Chear, "Re: Pango Khmer", gtk-i18n-list (January 5, 2004)
- ↑ Lin Chear, "Pango Khmer Module", gtk-i18n-list (January 16, 2004)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 GNOME Bugzilla, Bug 125605: Pango should support rendering of Khmer script (2003 to 2005)
- ↑ Maurice Bauhahn, "FAQ and Resources on Khmer in Unicode", khmerfonts.info (undated; entries from December 2003 to February 2004)
- ↑ KhmerOS project, "ABC and Limon font to Unicode Converters v1.8", SourceForge (files dated 2005)