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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Malayalam efforts
From:       Lars Knoll <lars () trolltech ! com>
Date:       2004-01-27 20:21:15
Message-ID: 200401272121.15771.lars () trolltech ! com
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On Tuesday 27 January 2004 19:44, Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
> Lars Knoll said on Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 04:01:59PM +0100,:
>  > You can discuss them with me. I'm responsible for most of the
>  > internationalization efforts inside Qt.
>
> Thanks.
>
>  > I can have a look at the rachana fonts and ensure Qt will work with
>  > them. I did some testing of our Malayalam support using the AkrutiMal2
>  > font (I didn't know about rachana).
>
> Right  now, the  work to  encoding them  into unicode  + OTF  is going
> on. WIll be made available

Thanks. Please tell me when you have something available, so I can test it.

> The difference between  Akruti and Rachana is that  Rachana has a huge
> collection of glyphs,  about 3 times available in  Akruti. The unicode
> consortium is of the view  that only the basic Vowevels and consonants
> need be standardised and rest of  glyphs can be put in the private use
> area. IMO, this  aspect has confused developers and  held back several
> attempts at l10n. My expectation  is that using Rachana under OTF will
> overcome the  confusion /  fear over non-standard/incompatible  use of
> the PUA.

There should not be any need to use Unicode's private use area at all. The 
advantage of open type is exactly, that you can live with the code points 
assigned in Unicode. The open type rendering engine (as we have one in Qt) 
will take care of shaping this Unicode text into the rendered form (ie. 
combining the combination you name below into one glyph when using Rachana, 
or leaving it as 4 glyphs when you use Akruti).

> Advantage  of Rachana  is that  it is  more close  to  the handwritten
> script; other  fonts available in  Malayalam (Free and  non-free) have
> pared down the number of glyphs available to the common man.
>
> I have one doubt though. Consider the consonant combination
> x0D17 + x0D26 + x0d31 + x0D41.
>
> (of course, with the zwj in between all characters)
>
> Rachana has  a separate  single glyph for  that.  Akruti  will require
> four  glyphs to  display  that.  Would there  be  any problems  (apart
> margins or  pagination issues) when  documents created using  one font
> are opened in the other?

Yes, this makes it sounds like Rachana is a nicer font.

> My undersanding of OTF is that there should not be any problems.

No. With OTF, all you use is the Malayalam Unicode area and encode your text 
as defined by Unicode. The open type shaping engine will then show this as 
good as every font can. This means that the string will be readable with both 
Akruti as with Rachana, but it will probably look a lot nicer using the 
better font.

> Will QT  take care of  such possibliities. Or  is it that there  is no
> problem here?

Qt will take care of all the issues related to translating the Unicode string 
into a stream of glyphs that get shown on the stream (using the open type 
features of the font).

Cheers,
Lars

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