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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Re: Any one working on Telugu language (te)?
From:       Thomas Diehl <thd () kde ! org>
Date:       2001-09-02 19:01:38
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Am Sonntag, 2. September 2001 18:49 schrieb Sailendra:

>        I am new to this list and have a query. Is any one
> working on localizing KDE in Telugu language (te)? Please
> let me know...
> thanks,
> Sailendra Pamidi.
> (pamidi_Sailendra@yahoo.com)

Quite a few people already showed up here with the same or a similar 
question (see CC). Problem is that support for Indic languages won't be 
there before Qt 3.1 at the earliest. Now we are apporaching 3.0 (due out 
this month).

See attached msg by Lars Knoll for an explanation. After that (or if 
anybody finds a workaround before) we sure hope to get Telugu and other 
Indian languages into KDE.

Regards,

Thomas



Von: Lars Knoll <lars@trolltech.com>
An: "Thomas Diehl" <thd@kde.org>, "srinu@nol.net.in" <srinu@nol.net.in>
Kopie: "Harsh Kumar" <harshku@vsnl.com>, "Karunakar Guntupalli" 
<indlinux@rediffmail.com> "U. Mohan Varma" 
<mvarma@cfdlab.aero.iisc.ernet.in>
 
Hi,

Telugu, as all other Indic languages is difficult to support in a complete 
way. The main problem is, that all these scripts have very complex rules as 
how to render a string of characters. If you once read the section about 
Devanagari or Tamil in the Unicode book, you probably know what I mean.

All these languages have very complex shaping behaviour (the shape of the 
character varies according to position), reordering (some vocals, in 
Devanagrai the i, are moved before the consonant they belong to), and a 
huge amount of ligatures.

We still don't have support for these scripts in Qt-3.0, but will try to 
get support for them into Qt as soon as possible. There are a lot of 
problematic issues to resolve before that however.

The first problematic issue is the difference between characters and 
glyphs. Unicode only defines "characters" for Indic languages (as opposed 
to glyphs, which are shaped variations of specific characters), so the 
engine needs to find out which glyphs to use for a sequence of characters 
in a string. This implies, that fonts used for rendering an indic script 
have to be a lot bigger than the range of characters defined in Unicode. At 
the moment, there is no standard on how to encode the glyphs needed for 
indic scripts (apart >from Microsofts approach with open type). We will 
need such a standard (or resort to open type) to be able to handle indic 
scripts.

The other issues are more or less internal to Qt, but nevertheless 
important. Qt will need a plugin mechanism to be able to load text engines 
for different scripts. These engines will need support for quite some 
things, most noticeably among them support for shaping, ligatures and glyph 
reordering. Other issues are cursor positioning and line breaking.

So you see, that all this is quite a complex issue, and will need a lot of 
work, before being able to write some indic language in a text editor.

Best regards,
Lars




-- 
KDE translation: http://i18n.kde.org/
Deutsche KDE-Uebersetzung: http://i18n.kde.org/de/

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