Re: [Indic-computing-devel] Fw: IndLinux Effort ...

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002 02:39:58 -0800 (PST)
jk...@Fr... (Joseph Koshy) wrote:

> 
> 
> > From: "J. Patricia Annie JebaMalar" <pa...@la...>
> > Subject: IndLinux Effort ...
> 
> Thank you Karunakar, for forwarding this announcement.
> 
> First question: how many teams are there sharing the name
> "indlinux"? I know of two now: 
> 
>   (1) indlinux at IIT-Madras and 
>   (2) indlinux at SourceForge.Net.  
> 
 There is no third. And 'indlinux' is not trademarked ;-)

> Is the work that they are doing related?
> 
 No. 

> > http://www.tenet.res.in/Donlab/Indlinux/
> 
> The web page talks about a ``Newly Modified XLIB'' ... so I went to
> have a look at the code.  Comments follow.
> 

  The same logic as ISCII plugin is used in it.
    You have a mapping table  ISCII -> ISFOC & vice versa.
  This logic &  table was developed by the LTRC team at IIIT Hyd.
People from IITK & Univ of Hyd were also involved in it. Their work is
at 	http://www.rxvt-idev.freeservers.com/
 All that is done at runtime is , (based on the current language
setting appropriate    if current char/string in ISCII  
     search through the table (a binary search) and get the ISFOC
equivalent.  display using the appropriate font.



> I don't mean to be harsh here; let me first say I appreciate the
> fact that someone has done work in this area and has made their work
> public for review.  Thank you!
> 
> However, as this implementation stands, this work is unlikely to end
> up in any standard distribution.  If the IIT-M folks had had access
> to better X expertise, my guess is that the end-result would have
> been more acceptable.
> 
 Maybe reason for NCST code being better.

(Off-topic see :  www.centurionlinux.com)

<snip>
> :Summary:
> 
> Some of the basic premises behind the design of this code have to be
> re-examined before it can effectively support indian languages and
> before this code can become part of a mainstream distribution.
> 
  Could you comment on this, & whether we can do something on these
lines	 http://www.x.org/contrib/i18n/

 Some lead developers (on KDE/GNOME, even X) have given the opinion
that complex text servies should be carried out at higher layers (eg
toolkits). Xft & Xrender mech. address the font issues, but not the
issues like , text reordering, cluster formation, glyph selection etc.
which is what pango does.

 Some discussions have been going on regarding modifying X text
support, mainly to accomodate complex texts & new font mechanisms.
Team from Sun made the foll posting
http://XFree86.Org/pipermail/i18n/2001-December/002727.html

 One font gurus opinion
http://XFree86.Org/pipermail/fonts/2001-December/001210.html

 Freetype's plans in reference to above
http://www.freetype.org/pipermail/devel/2001-December/002740.html

Regards,
Karunakar