Mission Statement

Living in Rome for a year, I learned a few things. One of them is the value of communication, particularly in the context of language.

Although America (and to a lesser degree England) seem to be lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of multi-linguality, the need to communicate with individuals speaking a variety of languages is becoming increasingly prominent. This is particularly true on the landscape of the Internet, where one can find millions of individuals researching, socializing, and conducting business transactions in a variety of languages.

There are, unfortunately, a number of complexities to producing multi-lingual content.

The first of which is knowing more than one langauge! ;) Learn one. No, learn three more. Ironically enough, words alone can't fully express the value of multi-linguality.

The second obstacle is getting the entry of multi-lingual content into a data source. Such limitations become increasingly apparent, for example, when one tries to provide English, Greek, Arabic, and Chinese versions of a particular set of data. How does one go about entering characters of each of those languages in one database or XML file?

It's possible, but there are generally a few "hoops" one must jump through in order to get the job done. What's more, the particular "hoops" vary greatly depending on what platform the content is being authored on.

That's why I'm working on Syggrafeus.

Syggrafeus is a Java software package I'm developing to facilitate Unicode text authoring, particularly in the context of providing a means to access non-Roman characters.

Although it would seem to be yet another text editing application at the moment, I'm not trying to create a new text editor (if I don't have to). There's plenty of great ones already, including the excellent jEdit.

My interest is rather in producing a library which will make multi-lingual text-entry easier in any of a number of existing Java text editors. Please see the features for more details on how I plan to attempt this.