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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Hindi
From:       Guntupalli Karunakar <karunakar () freedomink ! org>
Date:       2002-06-20 11:20:27
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On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 10:02:12 +0200
Lars Knoll <lars@trolltech.com> wrote:

> 
>  
> It is supposed to be handled by Qt. The main problem with Tamil (as
> with all indic languages) is that you need a huge amount of
> ligatures, that are not part of Unicode to render these scripts
> correctly. 
> 
> MS has solved this with the open type font technology, but there is
> currently no way to use open type on Unix. Without using it, one
> would need to standardize on a font encoding for these scripts and
> hardcode some ligature handling in the font engine (of Qt or Gtk). 
> 
 There was some glyph standardization effort going on (based on 8bit
encoding) , a final draft is to be released sometime soon. But this
effort seems too late now, since unicode is slowly becoming de facto
for indian languages.

 There is general consensus building up here (in India) that open type
font would be best suited for Indic scripts. There is already a
Opentype devanagari font available for free at
http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/
Indix also has a opentype module which can be used for other
applications, maybe this would be useful in Qt, if there are no
licensing issues. 

There is another Devanagari Opentype font in development , will be
soon released under GPL. Fonts for few more languages are also being
worked on. A govt funded project for development of Opentype fonts for
all Indian languages is planned.

> I think a solution to this should be based on Xft/freetype, where we
> can get direct access to the fonts, we should not even try to make
> it work with non Xft based systems. Getting the glyphs from Xft is
> not the problem, but knowing which glyphs to use for the ligatures.
> The best solution would be to implement the open type solution MS
> uses, as we can then use all indic open type fonts available.
> 
 Yeah, this only seems to be a viable solution now.
 Indix has the same MS kind of solution ( In fact some people involved
in it, had earlier worked with MS on their solution ). Pango is also
now taking similar approach for Indic opentype support.

Regards,
Karunakar
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