From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 19:44:53 EST
Hi Tavis,
I think that Pango has its own shapers for Bengali and
other Devanagari based scripts. Right now Abi has its
own shaping engine that does not use Pango - we
currently use XFT2 on Linux to draw the necessary
text.
I'm no i18n expert by any stretch of the imagination,
but I *think* this is what's going in here.
Cheers,
Dom
--- Tavis Barr <tavis.barr@liu.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone.
>
> I just installed AbiWord 1.1.3 from the RPMs and I
> have to say I'm very
> impressed by the progress. Congratulations.
>
> I'm trying to get the Bengali input method to work
> under gtk+. I use a
> plugin called imbeng, available from:
>
>
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=43331
>
> I fire up AbiWord under and Indian Bengali locale
> (LC_ALL=bn_IN.UTF-8
> abiword-2.0 &) and change the font to a Bengali font
> (Mukti in this case
> but I don't think it matters).
>
> The Bengali input method is correctly chosen by
> default (i.e., if I
> right-click in the text entry area, it's selected
> under "Input Methods")
> and when I start typing, the appropriate Bengali
> characters come out.
> This already means that it's at least half-working,
> because the imbeng
> program is responsible for turning multiple
> keystrokes into
> multiple-keystroke characters.
>
> However, the characters don't glyph properly when I
> display them. There
> are two points here and I'll try to give some
> background.
>
> Bengali (and other Devanagari-based scripts) work in
> a system where each
> syllable in a word is represented by a glyph for a
> consonant (or a
> single glyph for a string of consonants if they are
> pronpounced
> together, such as "str" or "pl") and an attached
> glyph for the vowel
> that follows that consonant. (Words that start with
> a vowel get a
> separate starting-vowel glyph.) Depending on the
> vowel, sometimes the
> vowel sign comes to the left of the consonant,
> sometimes to the right.
> For example, "e" and "i" come to the left of the
> consonant in Bengali,
> "a" to the right, "u" below, and "o" on both sides.
>
> So, for example, if I type the Bengali word "sneho"
> (meaning
> "affection"), I should expect to get a glyph for
> "sn", and then the
> glyph for "e" which in this case comes to the left
> of the glyph for
> "sn."
>
> Instead, I get the glyph for s followed by the glyph
> for n, and the "i"
> to the right of it all.
>
> One thing that makes me think that this is an issue
> of rendering and not
> input: Each of the consonants (s and n), when it is
> displayed, is
> followed by a special Bengali punctuation marker
> underneath that sort of
> means "don't treat the next character as a separate
> syllable." So the
> proper way to render appears to involve combining
> consonants into one
> glyph when they are followed by this marker.
>
> Currently, gedit 2.0 renders this input method
> correctly.
>
> I also suspect that if this problem exists for
> Bengali, it probably
> exists for other Indian languages.
>
> I'm sorry I don't know more about the internals to
> be able to suggest
> precisely what's wrong. I hope this note is helpful
> anyway in pointing
> out a bug. For more information on rendering
> Bengali, you might wish to
> visit the Bengali Linux project at
> www.bengalinux.org and talk to one of
> the developers there, who may at least know how it
> works on gedit (which
> is their reference program).
>
> Although I'm not familiar with the programs, I can
> and do code; let me
> know if there is any way I can assist with this.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Tavis
>
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