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List:       xfree-i18n
Subject:    Re: [I18n] default font for a language
From:       Pablo Saratxaga <pablo () mandrakesoft ! com>
Date:       2000-07-27 11:27:26
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Kaixo!

On Thu, Jul 27, 2000 at 08:29:31AM -0000, Karunakar  Guntupalli wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am working on enabling KDE to Indian languages.
> I have done all the configuration stuff for it, Hindi ttf fonts also working. When \
> i select Hindi  as language from  K -> Settings -> Desktop -> Language -> Hindi as \
> first language, I am not getting the hindi font as the default font, when i start a \
> new application. Am I missing something out???
> 
> fonts.dir for the hindi font is
> 
> VAKIL01.TTF -altsys-Vakil_01-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0
> Shymal01.ttf -altsys-Shymal01-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0

KDE doesn't use X11 at all for the font resolution (as it is obvious when
looking at the X11 font names: *-ascii-0, hum.)

So you should rather ask on a KDE mailing-list.

Note also that for languages using scripts derived from Brahmi it is not
possible to have a 1:1 identity between charset encoding and font encoding;
as the charset encoding, based on ISCII or Unicode, encodes the logical
letters and not the shapes, and indian scripts (specially devanagari)
create syllabes with complex shapes; so a rendering engine is needed
that will convert a stream of bytes into a different stream of font codepoints,
depending on the available fonts.

Currently it seems that raw X11 doesn't provide that yet.

There is the pango project (http://www.pango.org/) which aims to provide
a library for that, and there are already devanagari and tamil modules.
Next Gtk+/Gnome will use it; I really don't know about KDE, the lib is under
the LGPL, so it could be used by almost any project, but I ignore if there
are any plans to do so.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975


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