Subject: Re: Indian Language in AbiWord
From: Pierre Abbat (phma@oltronics.net)
Date: Fri Dec 28 2001 - 15:43:02 CST
On Wednesday 26 December 2001 14:05, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
> Hi there,
> The bidi version of AW does two-character ligatures, i.e., it can do
> a+b-> c; we do not do more then two at the moment. In future we
> will probably use Pango (www.pango.org) which will take care of
> that. We also do basic initial/medial/final/isolate glyph shaping.
> However, all of this only if the alternate glyphs have separate
> codepoints in Unicode, and I am not sure Indic languages do).
They don't. The alternate glyphs for the vowels do (one for the vowel in
isolation, and one for the vowel in combination with a consonant), but the
consonants don't. So if you have RKSSRI, that's stored in Unicode (which for
the Indic scripts is several copies of ISCII, 128 codepoints each, at
different offsets) as RA VIRAMA KA VIRAMA SSA VIRAMA RI, and you have to turn
that into I KSS SLASHRA CANDRA, where I is the vowel that is written before
the consonant it comes after, KSS is a ligature that looks nothing like K or
SS, SLASHRA (of which there may need to be two or three variants) is a
vertical bar with a slash attached, and CANDRA (the first R) is a crescent in
the upper right corner. I has a codepoint, but KSS and SLASHRA do not.
The rules are slightly different from one Nagari script to another. JI, for
example, has its own glyph in Gujarati, but not in Devanagari.
phma
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