Subject: Re: Indian Language in AbiWord
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Dec 26 2001 - 06:42:33 CST
--- Savant shanti <info2mein@yahoo.com> wrote: > Hi
again,
Hi.
> So how actually should I go to bring support of
> 'Assamese' in AbiWord.
> I thought that all the glyphs will be present in
> the font file itself. I mean, say the 'juktashara'
> (combining character) reside in font file itself
> just
> we need to press the keystroke which will produce
> it.
That should be the case. Do you have an Assamese
font? It needs to be a Unicode font, there are many
Indian-language sites on the internet for newspapers
and such which use ad-hoc fonts which are really just
hacks recoding latin fonts with a mixture of letter
glyphs and ligature glyphs. We don't want to use
these. So first make sure you do have a real font.
Actually I just looked it up and Unicode treats
Assamese as part of the Bengali character range since
they are almost identical except for a couple of
letters. So you need a Bengali font, preferably one
with Assamese support if such exists.
Then for input you also need a real keymap. If you
look at the keymap it should be outputting characters
in the U+0981 - U+09FA range (as well as the ASCII
range). If it's not outputting this range then it's
some kind of keymap I don't know about.
The fonts will contain both the isolated and ligated
forms of the glyphs plus the tables and logic needed
to transform the letters into ligatures. Diacritical
marks are handled the same way.
> It works though.
> Please tell me in detail how to start work with
> it
> and guide me in developing the code.
Unfortunately I'm not expert enough for much more
detailed help. Especially if you are using Unix or
Linux. If you are using Windows it already works to
a degree if you have the keymap and fonts. The
problems I am aware of are with text selection which
doesn't understand that multiple letters can be
rendered as a single glyph. But this is also a
problem in Arabic so the guys working on BiDi support
have probably some insight into this.
So do you have fonts and keymap? The other thing that
can be done is localization which doesn't require
programming but our current GUI design doesn't allow
for Unicode in the GUI on all our OSes. I think GTK
is currently having UTF-8 support added which will
solve this major problem. Again, correct fonts must
be installed and set up correctly.
Hope you're not getting too disillusioned - Indic
language support is a very tricky thing but
potentially millions of people can benefit.
Andrew Dunbar.
=====
http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Wed Dec 26 2001 - 06:42:38 CST