indic-computing-users Mailing List for The Indic-Computing Project (Page 17)

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Dr.Pavanaja

Can you please forward the urls. So that we too can have a look

regards
kiranchandra

Can you please forward the urls. So that we too can have a look

regards
kiranchandra

On Tuesday 29 April 2003 03:34 pm, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja wrote:
> Dear LL,
>
> Making a good quality font which joins all the glyphs properly
> and displays properly is NOT just a hinting question. Hinting
> comes at the end. There more issues like appropriate em values,
> weight, width, height, code pages, embeddable, etc. 

yes, am aware of these issues acutely.
>Mos important factor is to have a good non-intersecting clean
> outline. 

yes, this point is also understood.
>There are many whitepapers on the subject available on
> the web. Hinting improves the display at small point sizes. 

or at coarse resolutions.

could you please point the urls to the relevant whitepapers? also, if you 
have links to hinting whitepapers and pdfs, would also be appreciated.

>
> Currently all those who are making OTF are concentrating more on
> functionality than on asthetics. Once they have mastered the
> functionality aspect, I am very sure, atleast some of them will
> concentrate on improving the asthetics.

except that you may just find it is easier to design a font from scratch for 
better aesthetics, than to attempt cleaning an existing one.

>
> Our aim should be to master the technology, demonstrate it and
> then approach the publishing industry to sponsor high quality
> font development which is quite expensive affair.

chicken before the egg.

western digital typography was born the other way around. in fact, no matter 
what, poorer quality fonts have always fallen by the wayside, in my 
experience since 1982 with computers. no matter which media, which 
manifestation they come in.

OTF made its mark not with functional fonts in western typography but with 
highly polished, very professional, top-end fonts. otherwise the community 
would have been reluctant to adopt them. the case of indic languages is 
peculiar. even getting a functional indic OTF was/is a delight.

aiming for typset-quality typography is starting and ending with the problem 
solved completely. as we say in hindi "In the elephant's leg you will find 
the legs of all."

anyways, just my two paisas on the thought. please do give me the urls of the 
whitepapers.

:-)
LL

Dear LL,

Making a good quality font which joins all the glyphs properly 
and displays properly is NOT just a hinting question. Hinting 
comes at the end. There more issues like appropriate em values, 
weight, width, height, code pages, embeddable, etc. Most 
important factor is to have a good non-intersecting clean 
outline. There are many whitepapers on the subject available on 
the web. Hinting improves the display at small point sizes. The 
problem that you have mentioned has got more to do with good 
design rather than hinting.

Currently all those who are making OTF are concentrating more on 
functionality than on asthetics. Once they have mastered the 
functionality aspect, I am very sure, atleast some of them will 
concentrate on improving the asthetics. 

In fact, OTF technology gives more power to design a superb 
quality font. In case of TTF we are restricted to about 160 
glyphs wheras OTF has no such restriction. This fact is very 
useful for Indic scripts where the total number of combinations 
(V, C, C+V, C+C+V, C+C+C+V, ..etc.) possible is as high as  
15,000 for each language. in OTF, we can have large no. of glyph 
set to take care of many special cases. 

Our aim should be to master the technology, demonstrate it and 
then approach the publishing industry to sponsor high quality 
font development which is quite expensive affair.

Rgds,
Pavanaja

> thirdly, i don't see enough discussion+action on what to do with
> hinting and taking a professional, typeset-ready approach to font
> design.
> 
> a colleague recently tried out milan, and though impressed, asked me
> why the font seemed so broken. i sighed! here comes the hinting issue
> again. grid-fitting, pixel-resolving, and all that.
> 
> i wouldn't like to scare away simple-type endusers with unhinted fonts
> that look formidable.
> 
> to plod ahead, we must walk like an elephant, taking firm, strong,
> carefully meditated, and strategic steps. i already feel quite sad
> about the work in patialia. so *much* work, with some errors in the
> fundamental work. they too are suffering from the use of non-standard
> encoding, unhinted, even non-professional-design font, non-standard
> keyboard, and many issues. all of these problems are quickly solved
> though.
> 
> meanwhile, the patialia funded project closes by end of may. i had
> hoped, and they hope, to have a professional font design workshop
> conducted well before that, and that leaves us with about 3 weeks.
-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
Editor, Vishva Kannada
World's first Internet magazine in Kannada
http://www.vishvakannada.com/

Note: I don't worry about pselling mixtakes

> am feeling a bit frustrated about the lack of momentum and velocity.
> at the bangalore workshop, we had decided to hold regional workshops, and to 
> hold atleast one workshop by april end or may sometime, in delhi or 
> nearabouts.  

   We are working for a workshop in Kerala by mid May.

Arun.

Dear LinuxLingam,

If you haven't realized by now, the vast majority of the crowd
comprises of tourists; they'll gawk from the sidelines but not
take any responsibility.  There are a few manager-wannabes too:
these folks want to be seen as "in-charge" but the actual work 
has to be done by someone else :).

Whatever you see happening on Indic-computing is because of the
efforts of a handful of people (about 5 when I last counted).
I would say that these folks are doing a very decent job.

So, if you'd like to have more momentum, get behind the juggernaut
and push :).

 --- LinuxLingam <lin...@bh...> wrote: >
> am feeling a bit frustrated about the lack of momentum and velocity.

=====
Joseph Koshy, FreeBSD Developer, http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/
Founder/Manager/Programmer/Peon, The Indic-Computing Project
                                 http://indic-computing.sf.net

________________________________________________________________________
Missed your favourite TV serial last night? Try the new, Yahoo! TV.
       visit http://in.tv.yahoo.com

dear all,

am feeling a bit frustrated about the lack of momentum and velocity.
at the bangalore workshop, we had decided to hold regional workshops, and to 
hold atleast one workshop by april end or may sometime, in delhi or 
nearabouts.

meanwhile i have gone and aggressively promoted this to a lot of people who 
have been working with me on indic font design since my school font contest 
days and who wanted to take it further. have been stalling them, hoping we'd 
rather do it all under Indic computing.

no cigar.

april end is leading us into may. reminds me of that old lyric on time 
flowing by rapidly:
will february march? no, but april may.

secondly, i was hoping to see a small/detailed report on the website on the 
march bangalore workshop alongwith the photographs.

no cigar.

thirdly, i don't see enough discussion+action on what to do with hinting and 
taking a professional, typeset-ready approach to font design.

a colleague recently tried out milan, and though impressed, asked me why the 
font seemed so broken. i sighed! here comes the hinting issue again. 
grid-fitting, pixel-resolving, and all that.

i wouldn't like to scare away simple-type endusers with unhinted fonts that 
look formidable.

to plod ahead, we must walk like an elephant, taking firm, strong, carefully 
meditated, and strategic steps.
i already feel quite sad about the work in patialia. so *much* work, with 
some errors in the fundamental work. they too are suffering from the use of 
non-standard encoding, unhinted, even non-professional-design font, 
non-standard keyboard, and many issues. all of these problems are quickly 
solved though.

meanwhile, the patialia funded project closes by end of may. i had hoped, and 
they hope, to have a professional font design workshop conducted well before 
that, and that leaves us with about 3 weeks.

zara socheeyeh . . .

:-(
LL

On Monday 28 April 2003 09:52 am, you wrote:
> I had scribbled some logos for Indic Computing Consortium some
> times ago. But I did not show it to anyone.
>
please show us.

> The idea of zero is great. In fact my idea was using both zero
> and one. I used one such idea for the logo of KGP. Check out
> www.ganakaparishat.org. The logo is designed by me. If you
> notice carefully, it contains old 5 1/4" floppy, zeros and ones,
> and the Kannada letter "ka".
>
> I was making something similar for ICC which contains zero one
> and when they all are put togethr the Hindi letter "a" was
> implied. 

in fact, i was about to do a similar thing, and then i thought of you! 
Reason: hindi/devanagri is just one of the languages and scripts of india. 
what about the south indian languages, what about urdu, what about oriyan etc 
etc etc. i *consciously* decided *not* to make a logo that inadvertandly 
represented a glyph of one or a few indic languages.

also realized ICC has more to do than just font design and language encoding. 
there's lots more to be done. hence the logo has to be even more generic.

and finally, i zeroed in on zero. a perfect symbol for computing.
and if you look carefully at the way i've drawn zero, one also emerges from 
its centre, as a primitive shape.

hence the logo design.

:-)
LL

I had scribbled some logos for Indic Computing Consortium some 
times ago. But I did not show it to anyone.

The idea of zero is great. In fact my idea was using both zero 
and one. I used one such idea for the logo of KGP. Check out 
www.ganakaparishat.org. The logo is designed by me. If you 
notice carefully, it contains old 5 1/4" floppy, zeros and ones, 
and the Kannada letter "ka". 

I was making something similar for ICC which contains zero one 
and when they all are put togethr the Hindi letter "a" was 
implied. Recently I have shifted my house. All my stuffs are 
still in packed stage. I can't remember where are these 
drawings. I did not scan them.

Rgds,
Pavanaja

> LinuxLingam wrote to Koshy a few days ago:
> > > [niyam] got
> > > busy with designing a Logo for freedom matters, then fsf india,
> > > and prior to that with the patiala peg report
> >
> On Sunday 27 April 2003 10:38 am, Koshy responds: 
> >Hey, can we have one too?  :)
> ***
> 
> sure! attached with this email is a pdf file by Niyam that shows a
> Logo design and its concept for Indic Computing Consortium.
> 
> Koshy asked. And it just happened. Just like that. Within 45 minutes
> of Niyam's just sitting down and meditating over it.
> 
> would request koshy to publish it on a public site so people may
> further refer to it.
> 
> enjoy.
> 
> :-)
> LL
> 
> (ps: if anyone of you wishes to see the FreedomMatters logo, and/or
> the FSF-India logo out of curiousity, write to me, will point out the
> url where you may find them.)
> 

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
Editor, Vishva Kannada
World's first Internet magazine in Kannada
http://www.vishvakannada.com/

Note: I don't worry about pselling mixtakes

LinuxLingam wrote to Koshy a few days ago:
> > [niyam] got
> > busy with designing a Logo for freedom matters, then fsf india, and
> > prior to
> > that with the patiala peg report
>
On Sunday 27 April 2003 10:38 am, Koshy responds: 
>Hey, can we have one too?  :)
***

sure! attached with this email is a pdf file by Niyam that shows a Logo 
design and its concept for Indic Computing Consortium.

Koshy asked. And it just happened. Just like that. Within 45 minutes of 
Niyam's just sitting down and meditating over it.

would request koshy to publish it on a public site so people may further 
refer to it.

enjoy.

:-)
LL

(ps: if anyone of you wishes to see the FreedomMatters logo, and/or the 
FSF-India logo out of curiousity, write to me, will point out the url 
where you may find them.)

Hai everybody,

   i Have been trying to work with the telugu otf fonts. The tool i have
been using is pfaedit. Can anyone help me out whether there is an option
of having a kern pair with more than two glyphs. 

regards
kiranchandra

thanks pavanaja for that clarification.
let's just use the word 'indic' languages.
makes total sense and no ambiguity.

:-)
LL

--- Joseph Koshy <a_j...@ya...> wrote:

> NCST IndiX offers none of these advantages; in fact, quite the
> converse.  Existing X applications sometimes display garbled 
> text under it (among its other faults).

You have not mentioned which applications display garbled text with IndiX
and under which circumstances. You like it or not but IndiX provides
immediate localization solution to many applications including web browsers
(including Mozilla and lynx), terminal emulator, and printing. This kind of
solutions are currently not available with other approaches. People can
safely use IndiX until other people can come with "standard" solution. If
you run real applications then you'll not find any problem. IndiX is mainly
for Indian users and not for Chinese or Japanese people. If they can decide
to go out of the usual way in order to support their languages then why
can't we?

That too using Unicode encoding and OpenType font. And we are not against
any other solution. You can see that we have developed on-screen virtual
keyboard based on Gtk-2/Pango. You can download it from IndiX website.

- Keyur

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo
http://search.yahoo.com

Joseph Koshy wrote:

> scripts in (Chinese, Korean, Arabic whatever) correctly.  There
> are downsides to the Pango+GTK combination, but these are minor.

The biggest downside is the combination itself :) There are tons of 
non-gtk applications for Linux. Implementing the support in X will 
sidestep the toolkit wars.

	-Arun

Dear all Indians,

Very often I read people refering to Indian languages as 
vernacular languages. This was the word used by British 
while refering to the languages used by Indians, Africans, 
etc. meaning the language of slaves. Please check the 
Webster meaning of the word at http://www.m-w.com/. You can 
find out yourself. I have attached below the meaning of the 
word vernacular from the above site

-------------------------------------------------
Main Entry: 1ver=B7nac=B7u=B7lar 
Pronunciation: v&(r)-'na-ky&-l&r
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin vernaculus native, from verna slave born in the master's 
house, native
Date: 1601
1 a : using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather tha=
n a 
literary, cultured, or foreign language b : of, relating to, or being a 
nonstandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country c : of, 
relating to, or being the normal spoken form of a language
2 : applied to a plant or animal in the common native speech as 
distinguished from the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification
3 : of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place, or group; espec=
ially : 
of, relating to, or being the common building style of a period or place
- ver=B7nac=B7u=B7lar=B7ly adverb 
         Bottom of Form 0
------------------------------------------

I humbly request all patriotic Indians to refrain from 
using the word "vernacular".

Rgds,
Pavanaja

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
Editor, Vishva Kannada
World's first Internet magazine in Kannada
http://www.vishvakannada.com/

Note: I don't worry about pselling mixtakes

V E R N   V E R S I O N

With companies such as HP, Microsoft, Red Hat, NIIT, and Reliance putting 
serious money into it, the vernacular computing market in India tooks set 
to bloom in 2003. 

BY PRIYA SRINIVASAN
www.business-today.com

AS REVOLUTIONS GO, THIS IS A QUIET ONE. IT HAS ITS BEGINNINGS IN hundreds 
of villages such as Madantusi in Uttar Pradesh, where children exposed to 
computers and the Net have their own unique lexicon -- 'dumroo' (drum in 
Hindi) for the hourglass icon and 'sui' (needle) for the cursor. Sify and 
Rediff, portals with local language sites and Hindi-site Webduniya (its 
user base has almost trebled from 426,310 to 12,44,493 since 2000) are 
card-carrying members. And converts to the cause include the likes of HP, 
Microsoft, Red Hat, Reliance, C-DAC, and Mumbai-based start-up Netcore 
Solutions.

Welcome to the great Indian language computing offensive.

Efforts to take computing to the masses are as old as computing itself, 
but it is the Internet -- and the hundreds of web-based applications 
following in its wake -- that has endowed them with a sense of relevance 
and purpose.

The most viable manifestation of this is content. "The Internet is a 
self-organising system," says Sugata Mitra, the Chief Scientist at 
computer education firm NIIT. Madantusi is one of the 100-odd villages 
covered under its Minimally Invasive Education initiative.

"As content providers see enough people to cater to, they begin to cater 
to them; what we are seeing now is the beginning of the movement." And 
with the Net breaking the ice with a hitherto computer-shy audience, 
companies are queued up in the wings with their own vern versions.

THE ENGINE INSIDE

Software is an obvious gambit. By 2003-end  Microsoft with launch Hindi 
versions of Windows XP and Office 11. Around the same time, if not 
earlier, Red Hat will be out with a Hindi-enabled version 9.1 (built 
around Linux).

Both are priced offerings, but Red Hat's software can, unlike Microsoft's, 
be copied to several machines. After all, Red Hat is an advocate of the 
Free Software, or the Open Source Software movement. Several hundred 
developers who swear by Open Source are working towards making the layers 
that go over the operating system support local languages.

Part of the umbrella GNU (a recursive acronym that stands for GNU's Not 
Unix) system this includes the GNOME layer (GNU Network Object Model 
Environment), a sort of Windows-like desktop for non-Windows environment 
and the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

		PHOTO: Rajesh Jain, managing director, Netcore
		Solutions. This former Indiaworld man will soon launch
		a PC branded Emergic Freedom that will be enabled
		in Hindi -- from Operating System to Graphical
		User Interface. Prices will start as low as Rs 5000.

Linux is one kernel around which GNU systems are built -- the Free 
Software Foundation has its own kernel of choice, HURD -- and most local 
language experiments use it.

"We see a definite demand for localisation and from a Linux standpoint, a 
lot of work is happening since anyone can take on this work," says Javed 
Tapia, Director, Red Hat India, referring to the fact that any developer 
is free to participate in the movement to provide local language support 
on the GNU/Linux system.

The result is a rash of activity among developer communities (and 
companies) across the country. 

"GNU systems are becoming very popular at both the government and 
enterprise level -- it's not just about cost, the technology helps us to 
share, distribute and improve; that these systems are economical is 
incidental," says Nagarjuna G., Director, Free Software Foundation of 
India and a scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, 
Mumbai.

Several governments (and arms of governments), non-governmental 
organisations and environmental institutions are currently working on Open 
Source support for languages. Microsoft's reaction to a body of work that 
could change the face of the market is predictable.

"Drill down a little on the Open Source work and you will find a 
reinvention of the wheel," says Raveesh Gupta, Program Manager, 
Localisation, Microsoft India. "Why replicate all the work on another 
platform?"

The real issue, according to Gupta, isn't about who is doing what, but 
about adopting a common standard for application development. The man 
isn't far off the mark -- this is the refrain of anyone involved in 
creating language software.

The problem is that developers of Indian language software have been 
following proprietary standards. That means data stored in one software 
cannot be transferred to another, at least not without expending time and 
money. That goes against the cross-platform philosophy that resides at the 
heart of computing today and has raised the hackles of anyone involved 
with local language computing development.

"It is a big issue. Without some agreed-upon standard, even simple things 
we have come to expect from most applications, like cut-and-paste, are not 
possible," says San Francisco-based Tapan Parikh, the founder of EkGaon, a 
company that develops Indian language websites and applications.

There is a solution -- the adoption of the Unicode standard for all Indian 
languages. 

For those who came in late, Unicode is a standard that represents 
characters as integers. The widely used ASCII (American Standard Code for 
Information Exchange) code uses 7 bits for each character; Unicode does 
16. Ergo, it can represent some 65,000 unique characters, making it just 
the thing for a multi-language pan-Indian software.

The problem is that developer groups working on some Indian languages feel 
Unicode does not support some fundamental characters. The government has 
now stepped in and is trying to resolve the issue.

"We are in the midst of a trial or suggested version of Unicode. There is 
no controversy, but some southern languages need more numbers of letters 
and combinations, they need more space. Also there are more 
'samyuktaksharas' (combined letters) in these languages," says P.K. 
Chaturvedi, Director, Ministry of Information Technology. 

Still, Unicode  won't solve a bigger problem threatening the spread of 
langauge computing -- access.

		WHY LANGUAGE MAKES SENSE
		It's simply a matter of numbers
		Sify's page views on language portals

		TAMIL Dec 2000		5,00,000
		      Jan 2003		8,00,000

		TELUGU Dec 2000		1,80,000
		       Jan 2003		3,50,000

		MALAYALAM Dec 2000	1,00,000
			Jan 2003	3,00,000

		HINDI	Dec 2000	1,00,000
			Jan 2003	1,25,000

WHERE'S THE CHASSIS?

Access has long been a hurdle to the spread of computing in India. Some 
analysts reckon PCs will have to cost a seventh what they do now before 
computing can reach the masses. 

That's where Mumbai-based Netcore Solutions comes in. 

The company, promoted by Rajesh Jain -- the same lucky man who sold 
Indiaworld to Satyam for close to Rs 5000 million -- has an altogether 
different game plan to take access to the masses. "We are the topmost 
layer of the pyramid as far as PC and Net penetration go with just about 
10 million Net users and 2 million PC owners," says Jain.

"The next three years will be about reaching the 100 million mark for Net 
users and how are we going to do it? The approach has to be bottom up -- 
its about making technology accessible to people and language is a big 
component of that."

Jain is currently in the process of taking his desktop PC, branded Emergic 
Freedom, to the market. 

One model of the PC that will be enabled in Hindi (right from the OS to 
the Graphical User Interface) will be priced as low as Rs 5000. How does 
Netcore plan to do it? For starters, the PC will run totally on Open 
Source software -- that cuts out licence fees. Then, based on Jain's 
belief that most users do not really want hard disks, but simple access 
devices that can be connected to a network, Emergic Freedom will be a 
network PC of sorts (Netcore is in discussion with cable operators and 
other possible partners to create a server-centric computing environment). 
And, finally, the company will cannibalise old boxes or discarded PCs to 
really drive down the price.

Only time will tell whether Jain's gamble works, but the urgent need to 
drive down PC prices dramatically to catch the next wave of users is 
indisputable.

In fat, HP Labs India has internalised the need enough to actually call 
one of its language systems divisions 'Affordable Access Devices". HP Labs 
India is currently working on developing an access device called 
Scriptmail where mail can actually be written by hand and then, through a 
simple interface, carried on the Internet.

Another interesting project at HP Labs India is the Directed Dialogue 
System whereby users can actually call out questions into phones and have 
answers called out to them from existing databases, thanks to an online 
voice-enabled Indian language system.

"There are five times as many telephone users in India as Net users and 
this is a system which will make use of that existing base," explain 
Srinivasan Ramani, Research Director, HP Labs India.

		IT's FREE
		Free software for language computing -- a WIP list

		o NCST IndiX Project: This will enable Hindi and other
		Indian languages on GNU/Linux systems

		o IndLinux: Support for Hindi on GNOME

		o Swathanthra Malayalam Computing Project: Support
		for Malayalam on GNOME

		o IIT Madras: Support for Tamil on GNU/Linux system.

Government-run C-DAC is also trying its hand at manufacturing and selling 
a language-enabled device on a commercial scale. The Pocket Translator, 
originally developed for tourists, is now being Internet-enabled and the 
organisation is approaching manufacturers with a view to launch the 
product this year, says R.K.Arora, Executive Director, C-DAC.

From the myriad efforts underway to kick-start language computing, it is 
evident that India is at the threshold of a vern wave. One trigger could 
be all it takes to create a commercially significant user base. That could 
be Netcore's PC, a new access device, or anything else. 

This is a revolution waiting to happen. (###)

CIRCULATE IN PUBLIC INTEREST BY:
-- 
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Freelance Journalist          | http://www.bytesforall.org
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http://linuxinindia.pitas.com | http://www.livejournal.com/users/goalinks
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,
I am pleased to announce the latest member of the Free Bangla Fonts
Project collection - Sagar (The Sea).
Sagar is a Free OpenType font containing covering the entire Unicode
range for Bengali, and covering most of the commonly used juktakkhars
(conjuncts).
Sagar has been developed using the glyphs donated by Mr Omi Azad from
Bangladesh. 
We have also used a "templating system" to create the convert the font
quickly and efficiently into an OTF.
(More details can be found at our mailing lists archive at
http://mail.nongnu.org/archive/html/freebangfont-devel/2003-03/threads.html)
Sagar can be downloaded from 
http://savannah.nongnu.org/files/?group=freebangfont
(However, please note that the font is not yet usable in M$ Windows (tm)
- I am yet to find out why).

-Enjoy the release-
-regards-
Sayamindu

PS: The work on the conversion has been done entirely on Free Software
(three cheers for pfaedit !!)
PS again: Many thanks to Deepayan Sarcar for working on the template
system - that really made life a lot easier ;-)

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta [ http://www.peacefulaction.org/sayamindu/ ]

=========================================
Speak out on social and cultural issues
		at
	PeacefulAction.Org
    http://www.peacefulaction.org
*****************************************

>  Redhat uses Gnome 2, Gnome 2 uses the indic support in Pango. Use RH
> (Gnome) if you dont want to tinker much, else try Indix.

Karunakar is making his characteristic understatements here :).

The issue is more than one of simple ease of use.

If you use Gnome 2 and Pango, you get backwards compatibility 
with X servers and X terminals made two decades back and forward
compatibility all the way till X dies.  Further with GTK & Pango,
you can display indian language text side by side with other 
scripts in (Chinese, Korean, Arabic whatever) correctly.  There
are downsides to the Pango+GTK combination, but these are minor.

NCST IndiX offers none of these advantages; in fact, quite the
converse.  Existing X applications sometimes display garbled 
text under it (among its other faults).  

You may or may not come across this if you do ad-hoc 
testing.  However, the X test suite is readily available off 
the XFree86 site [via CVSup/CVS], and comes with tools that 
allow you to view the output of buggy servers conveniently.  
It takes about 15 minutes to setup and run (just follow the 
README) and confirm what I'm saying for yourself -- maybe you 
or Karunakar should try this out and satisfy yourselves.

=====
Joseph Koshy, FreeBSD Developer, http://people.freebsd.org/~jkoshy/
Founder/Manager/Programmer/Peon, The Indic-Computing Project
                                 http://indic-computing.sf.net

________________________________________________________________________
Missed your favourite TV serial last night? Try the new, Yahoo! TV.
       visit http://in.tv.yahoo.com

dear all,

anybody checked out this software? its under the gpl, and makes short work of 
creating say a website or xml/html front-end, which needs to be multi-lingual.

would be of interest to TIET, given they have done considerable website 
development.
:-)
LL

BabelKit BabelKit-1.05 
http://freshmeat.net/releases/120564/

    BabelKit is an interface to a universal multilingual database code
    table. It takes all of the programming work out of maintaining multiple
    database code definition sets in multiple languages. The code
    administration and translation page lets developers define new virtual
    code tables, new languages, enter all codes and their descriptions, and
    then translate them into all languages of interest. Perl and PHP
    classes retrieve the code descriptions and automatically generate HTML
    code selection elements in the user's language. This makes
    internationalization and localization of Web sites and database
    interfaces much easier. 

:-)
LL

On Wed, 23 Apr 2003 08:44:57 +0530
"Dr. U.B. Pavanaja" <pav...@vi...> wrote:

> Hi Koshy,
> 
> What about Redhat latest distribution with Hindi 
> (Milan?)? Does it follow NCST or Gnome? Which one I 
> should go for?
> 
 Redhat uses Gnome 2, Gnome 2 uses the indic support in Pango. Use RH
(Gnome) if you dont want to tinker much, else try Indix.

Regards,

-- 

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things
that
you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines.
Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream.Discover."  			- Mark Twain

---------------------------
* Indian Linux project    *
* http://www.indlinux.org *
---------------------------

Hi

  What are the other encodings for Indian Languages, as TSCII for Tamil,
ISCII for all Indian Languages. TSCII is specific for Tamil, Is there
such encodings available for Malayalam, Hindi, Telugu..etc. ? Where can
we get the details of that ?

with regards 
ViveK

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 
Viveka Nathan K, DON Lab, IITM, Chennai-36, India. Ph:044-22578904/8353 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
All condemnation of others really condemns ourselves - Swami Vivekananda

--__--__--

Message: 14
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 00:16:04 +0530
To: plu...@pl..., ind...@li...
From: Sudhanwa Jogalekar <sud...@vs...>
Subject: [PLUG] FAQ/Howto on Marathi/devnagari usage
Reply-To: plu...@pl...

At 06:17 PM 4/22/03, you wrote:
>Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 18:13:31 +0530
>From: Guntupalli Karunakar <kar...@fr...>
>To: plu...@pl...
>Subject: Re: [PLUG] TTF giri
>Organization: Netcore Solutions
>Reply-To: plu...@pl...
>
>On Tue, 22 Apr 2003 10:20:50 +0530
>Abhijit Gadgil <gab...@ee...> wrote:
>
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I am trying to read esakal web page inside opera (6.12). I
> > downloaded the subak*.ttf put them in proper place
> > /usr/X11/lib/fonts/TTF/ on Redhat 8.0. Restarted the xfs (Xfs config
> > file points to the TTF directory in the catalogue.) However I m
> > still not able to see the web page properly. (Infact I even tried
> > that with an X server restart.) Its still not working.. What am i
> > missing exactly?
> >
>It should be font naming problem
>Try adding these lines in fonts.alias in same dir as font.
>
>"SUBAK-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0
>"SUBAK-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-fcd8859-15
>"SUBAK-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
>"SUBAK-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
>"SUBAK-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15
>"Subak-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-ascii-0
>"Subak-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-fcd8859-15
>"Subak-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso10646-1
>"Subak-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
>"Subak-1" -misc-subak_1-medium-r-normal--0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-15

Dear Karunakar,

These days, we have seen a lot of very useful mails (on PLUG mailing list) 
for using devnagari fonts on Linux under various applications.
If we collect all these mails together and organise them properly, it will 
become a very good FAQ/Howto for Marathi/Devnagri usage.

Looks like more such mails are expected on this and the number of users are 
increasing. These mails can also be added to such Howto/FAQ.

This can also be put up on the Indlinux project website.

What you think about it.

Any volunteers?

-Sudhanwa

~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
Knowledge is proud that it knows so much; Wisdom is humble that it knows no 
more.
~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~!~
www.sudhanwa.com

-- 
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May I request for any material on pango .
Is there any editor using pango and using OTF. How an input method is to 
be written.
to the best of my knowledge Pango documentation has viewer but no editor.
Who all are  working on pango. My students at VJTI, mumbai (swapnil etc) 
, have started studying it and would like to collaborate.

I would also  like to keep a CD of the Patiala addendum.
-Jitendra

dear all,

forgot a few more issues i had raised at the patiala interaction.

on the subject of localization, had also briefly explained to the language 
lab people, the importance and role of pango. explained how pango is central 
to the development of localization.

also mentioned milan, the malayalam gnome2 localization, bengalinux, and 
other similar projects.

Dr L was in the process of creating a gurmukhi/punjabi text editor, so 
explained the role of yudit and how it handles indic easily.

also briefly showed how pfaEdit handles font encoding, type design, hinting, 
and font formats, etc. mentioned dr nagarjuna's experience on the near 
instant response he usually gets from the authors of pfaEdit for any issues 
he has with the software.

have received the photo prints of the patiala trip today. am receiving the cd 
that contains the photos by saturday. will upload them to a temp site so you 
may download and upload to the punjabi localization site, and will courier 
the cd as well. who do i send the cd to, karunakar, or vijay?

:-)
LL

http://www-3.ibm.com/software/globalization/topics/indic/

The article is quite well written. It even touches the issue of 
pure consonant approach.

-Pavanaja

> shortly after the march 2k3 bangalore workshop, noticed someone posted
> a mail on ibm publishing a huge set of reference material on indic
> computing. anyone knows the url?
> 
> LL
> 
> 
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> 

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
Editor, Vishva Kannada
World's first Internet magazine in Kannada
http://www.vishvakannada.com/

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