Better Keyboard/Unicode Support

Last night we had a Chinese New Year party at my place. Great fun, beautiful fireworks provided by RacerX, free Chinese clothes, Hong Bao money tree, etc.

Naturally, a few people wanted to speak some Chinese. Which you can only do in SL if you type in Pinyin (i.e. Latin characters). Which is kind of lame, not very authentically Chinese at all.

I can see that this is an old issue. See, for example, this thread. In fact, the needs of these European customers to have their keyboards recognized far outweigh my desire to have the ability to type Chinese or Japanese into SL the way I can in every OTHER application I have on my Mac. Or the Windows box in the house. At least I can type normal characters like : without having to memorize some bizarre alt key combination. But really, why not just take advantage of the support for character sets and keyboards that the modern operating systems provide?

Granted, this could mean some people meeting other people they might not be able to converse with, or folks giving names to things that other people wouldn't be able to read, but heck, I deal with that in RL all the time anyway. I think it would add a lot of interest to SL.

Thanks for listening,

猫神

Would you believe I was promised international keyboard support on my very first day here?

Unfortunately, yes, I do believe that. And if they're ignoring Eggy, they're not going to listen to humble little me. But I figured it was worth bringing it up again.

neko

As far as I can tell, SL only supports the basic 96 characters of 7-bit ASCII. Fancy stuff like code pages or Unicode is far in the future.

It may not be that far. I just bugged them about it today and at least the asian keyboard support is in the queue. No doubt they will get around to cleaning everything up for us euro peons as well.

I think the day LL supports keyboard support for international languages is the day they will need to specifically hire bilingual Liasons. (Not that some of the Liasons aren't.)

You do know the focus of 1.6 is LL supporting UTF8, right?

When / where was this announced?

Hire me, I am fluent in four languages

*puts on his Donald Trump voice*
Eggy, you're hired.

*nothing happens*

I suppose you need to ask a Linden, instead! lol!

Heh. I want to add that I didn't want to brag or sound like it was a big deal.
Consider this:
I am Portuguese. I get that one for free.
We are required to learn two foreign languages in high school, but since I went to a particularly good elementary school, I had many years of French and English, always getting top grades.
My country is a narrow strip of coastal land. Spain is 100 miles from here, we can go shopping there, and often vacation there.
Every single god damn product is labeled in both Spanish and Portuguese, and cable TV shows are also bilingually labeled.
We can also get all the spanish TV channels and stuff. So it's not very hard - I've been told that Portuguese is just Spanish with a russian accent LOL
Besides, it's all just Latin. I can understand quite a bit of Italian without ever having had any training...