Linux Instant Messenger

Kenno’s post about Pidgin reminds me about Kopete, my favorite instant messenger in Linux.

Kopete’s logo

Sometimes ago, I wrote an article about communication via Kopete using Khmer Unicode. Sometimes it was really difficult to communicate in English if you are Cambodian. We can’t just find an equivalent English words of what you want to say in your native language. Most Cambodian chatters use language transliteration during their chatting.

Yap Man! – This is the English transliteration of the word “យ៉ាប់​មែន” (sorry, Khmer Unicode is required here to avoid the square boxes) in Khmer. I can’t find any English word equivalent to this Khmer word. One of my colleagues suggested “Bullshit” but I don’t think so.

Install OpenOffice Khmer Spell Checker

My cyber-friend, Kenno, has written a very step-by-step instruction on how to install KSC in Debian on his blog.

For how to install it on other Linux distribution and Windows, please follow the instruction contains in the Readme file of the KSC download package.

Discussion about how to install KSC at KhmerOS website:
- http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/1942
- http://www.khmeros.info/drupal/?q=en/node/1939

KhmerOS released Khmer Unicode spell checker for OpenOffice

Writing Khmer correctly is a very challenge work. It was always a dream to have a computer software which can handle this spelling task. In the past, there were a lot of discussion about this kind of tool. Some people also made some effort to create such tool (we still remember about Nathan’s initiative at SBBIC). Lately, KhmerOS released its first version of Khmer Spell Checker for OpenOffice (both on Windows and Linux). The word list is based on Samdech Chuon Nat dictionary.

I have successfully installed and tested the Spell Checker in OpenOffice 2.1 (both on Windows XP and openSUSE 10.2).

- Almost 100% of people write this ព័ត៌មាន incorrectly.
- The word ប្ដី is also wrong if you use Coeng T (ជើង​ត). You must use Coeng D (ជើង​ដ).
- In Samdech Chuon Nat writing style, it’s wrong to write សម្រាប់ in the descriptive way.
- A rule of thumb is that, you must use Zero-Width Space otherwise you will meet the same situation like the last phrase (ខ្ញុំទៅសាលារៀន).

Based on the word list, the tool offers various choice of suggestion.

It would be also nice to use OpenOffice spelling dialog to check spelling for a long document.

See my original post at KhmerOS website.