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Indian government supports Linux (Economic Times)
India's Economic Times reports
on a government sponsored project to localize Linux in 11 different
languages. "As part of Project Indix, the government has already
released Linux in Hindi. While five more language releases is lined up for
Thursday, the technology will be available in six more local languages in
three or four months. The five languages lined up now are Sanskrit,
Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada." (Thanks to Nilesh Trivedi)
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Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 16, 2003 20:15 UTC (Tue) by juvvadi (guest, #7294) [Link] Going by the past history, I am very skeptical that some good work will come outof government bodies in India. Some standard encodings need to be established so that font designers can design fonts to those encodings. It is pathetic that after this many years no standards body established any guidelines for font designers. Ramana
Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 16, 2003 20:27 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] But how about Unicode? Isn't it standard?
Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 16, 2003 21:59 UTC (Tue) by juvvadi (guest, #7294) [Link] Unicode is a useless standard for desigining fonts in Indian languages. That iswhy Tamil, one of the Indian languages, designed its own encoding TSCII (supported by QT now). Other scripts are more complex and somebody QT/GTK/X11 folks to get a practical encoding. Paralelly, some work needs to be done for input schemes to work with editors and word processors. All in all, the technical side of it is only moderately difficult. Bigger issue is somebody with enough clout needs to establish workable standards. My skepticism stems from the fact that Govt bodies being in a powerful position to establish something have done a bad job so far. Ramana
Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 17, 2003 4:57 UTC (Wed) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link] It looks to me that TSCII is a subset of unicode.http://www.tamil.net/tscii/faq5.html This message from 1998 says that TSCII was developed as an intermediate hack^W step because unicode is not supported on old operating systems. http://www.infitt.org/tscii/archives/msg00562.html
Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 17, 2003 6:14 UTC (Wed) by rganesan (subscriber, #1182) [Link] TSCII is an 8-bit encoding. However, it's not correct to say that Unicode has been rejected for Tamil. If you subscribe to tamilinix@yahoogroups.com you'll see that Unicode does enjoy good support and at least some active participants in the list believe Unicode is the future for Tamil computing.
Then please fix Unicode Posted Sep 17, 2003 15:09 UTC (Wed) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link] Unicode is a useless standard for desigining fonts in Indian languages. Please, then you need to fix Unicode. Western software developers are willing to do some work to support other languages, but we're not interested in special-casing for obscure languages. The Unicode standard will generally accept any nationally-standardized encoding as a subset of Unicode. GTK is Unicode-based. Java is Unicode-based. More and more systems are switching to Unicode in hopes of getting some support for internationalization. Pango provides sophisticated, Unicode-based layout support for several very complex Indian languages.
Then please fix Unicode Posted Sep 17, 2003 16:23 UTC (Wed) by juvvadi (guest, #7294) [Link] A little bit of history here. The govt of India had a standard called ISCII. While it had theblessing of the govt, it wasnt particularly useful for desiging any editors or word processors, so software developers didnt pay any attnetion to it. Unicode consortium just rehashed ISCII and declared they covered the Indic scripts. Fixing the unicode really requires the recognition from standard bodies requires recognition that it is broken in the first place ( in the context of Indic scipts). Unicode consortium listens to only those who have some clout. A simpler option is to establish a different encoding for each Indian language and incorporate it into the tool kits like GTK/QT. Once an alternate encoding gains popularity among developers unicode might even be willing to formalize it. Ramana
Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 16, 2003 22:11 UTC (Tue) by josh_stern (guest, #4868) [Link] Google lead me to this page:http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/ It indicates they are using OpenType. My understanding is that Xft is supposed to work with OpenType and recent X Serves work with Xft. One motivation for modifying the server code might be to allow more existing apps to work with substitution of different fonts and text. Except that most existing apps don't support unicode and it would be easier to move them to UTF-8. So I'm actually confused about their technical plan.
Design an encoding for the fonts first and an input scheme Posted Sep 19, 2003 1:31 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link] Minor factual correction: Xft lives completely on the client side.
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