From kde-i18n-doc Mon Sep 02 14:52:11 2002 From: Guntupalli Karunakar Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2002 14:52:11 +0000 To: kde-i18n-doc Subject: Re: Indic support in Qt (Re: RE:Translations to Kannada (KN) ?) X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-i18n-doc&m=103097833119028 On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 15:36:56 +0200 Thomas Diehl wrote: > Am Samstag, 31. August 2002 12:35 schrieb Thomas Diehl: > > > As repeatedly stated already: We are promised some basic support > > for Indic languages in Qt 3.1. According to the Troll Tech pages, > > the beta for this is supposed to start within the next few weeks. > > The bad news is: As Lars Knoll ("our man at Trolltech") just told > me, Indic support will not be very much improved in Qt 3.1. either. > He just has not found the time yet to do this single handed but > would appreciate any help (and of course patches) to improve the > situation of Indic languages in Qt. > Oh, this really bad but I think we can work a way out. The basic thing is here we dont have people (in India) who know Qt inside out, so If even if we can do the language stuff, we dont know how to plug it into Qt , in a proper way ( adhoc solutions can be easily worked out but are not good thing to do ). If we could have an idea on how it could be done (which modules in qt ) , ie how Indic part should fit in, then its easy to get people here working on it. > Basically, he is apparently faced with the dilemma that either open > type support needs to be implemented (which is a huge job, esp. > with Xft being kind of a moving target) or there has to be an > agreement on a proprietary font encoding (which is not really in > sight yet). > Some efforts for font standardization have happened for few langauges. eg Kannada itself a free font has been released ( based on 8 bit encoding, has some 150 glyphs ) also with tables on how to compose the glyphs. For Devanagari too a font standard ( 8 bit ) is in making, but no font of this encoding has been made mainly because Opentype seems to be more appropriate choice. Another way out is to use a custom font with Unicode Indic ranges with other glyphs mapped in private area. This could be a temporary solution. We could sort this out. Two weeks from now a workshop on Indic computing is being organised in Bangalore (India), this is an effort to bring people working on Indic solutions onto a common platform & to evolve standards and recommend implementations. Post workshop, workgroups for different areas in Indic computing will be form who will work with different project groups where Indic support is to be added. I will bring up Qt issue in the workshop & will try to form a group which can start working in this direction. Regards, Karunakar