[Mlterm-dev-en] display of Indic text

[Steve W. <ste...@gm...>]

Hi,

I've been looking into the effectiveness of various modern terminal
emulators for the use by speakers of Indic languages, such as Hindi,
Gugarati, Bengali, etc.  Of course mlterm caught my eye.  But I've not
got it working to my satisfaction.

I installed it on my Linux Mint system, but found that it wouldn't
display any Indic text at all.  It turned out, the distro version is
built with 'use_ind' disabled.  Well, that's unfortunate... no problem
-- I built it myself with 'use_ind' turned on, like so
     ./configure -with-tools=use_ind

This custom build of mlterm displays Indic letters, but the text is
practically unreadable, because Indic text shaping has not been
applied, and the letters are all jumbled up -- in Hindi, viramas are
always visible and not used to group consonants, so that an i-vowel
after a consonant cluster is not moved to the head of the cluster.
And so on. This kind of processing is usually handled by the font
rendering layer, but it appars that functionality has been disabled.

I'm talking about the Indic text transoformations described in the
Unicode Standard ch12, for instance in the section on Hindi, under the
heading "Principles of the Devanagari Script".

Your competitor, KDE's Konsole, does a pretty good job rendering
Devanagari script, on the same system, using the same font. (Even it
is challenged by line wrapping of Indic text though!)

Have I missed some configuration option?

Thanks!