Khmers in Cambodia have computers there. It's just that they don't have solid Internet connections, or use Internet mostly in Cybercafés. This effectively limits their usage of Gnutella.
But there's a wide community of khmers abroad, notably in China, Thailand, Europe, Australia, ...
The only thing is that the Khmer language was, until recently only supported on computers with Latin transcriptions. There's still no 8-bit standard for the script, but Khmer is now encoded in Unicode (and Windows XP SP2 and 2003 Server now support the Khmer script). The limiting factor for it is the absence of free fonts for at least the basic script.
Same remark about Vietnam whose Internet development is not so ridiculous (Vietname is now widely open to tourism...) Modern Vietnamese uses the Latin script, but it is still considered "complex" because their use of the script includes letters with two accents. There's a national VISCI standard for 8-bit processing (but it cannot conform to ISO-8859 requirements, as it uses some C0 and C1 control codes to encode some letter compositions). But there's a supported Windows codepage 1258 which does work using only the C1 control positions (like in other Windows ANSI codepages), at the price of composed sequences with combining diacritics. Windows Vietnamese comes with a Vietnamese keyboard, and the necessary fonts are the same as in the other Latin distributions: Arial, Times New Roman, Courier...
I know that some Khmers/Cambodians leaving in Vietnam commonly use the Vietnamese Latin letters. So why not a Cambodian (Latin) translation if Cambodian (Khmer) is too complicate to have for now, and the current Unicode encoding is used only by academic Khmer searchers or librarians that can have the necessary toolkit on their computer? |