Language support summary/discussion

[omiazad]

Hello Martin,
I was a bit upset trying to use Linux but your reply is showing me some
hope once again.

I must tell you that Fedora is the only distro, which supports Bangla.
All applications comes with Pango enabled and that helps much to the
users. They are also using the Bangla (I'll use Bangla instead of
Bengali from now) interface of Gnome and KDE, but skilled users may not
like that. So I don't suggest you to use Bangla interface right now.

Well, I'm very new in this Linux platform. Last time I was helping
Microsoft for sorting out all the Bangla input/output problems for
Windows and everything is fine by their Windows XP Service Pack 2
release. Still I'm working with them for Bangla LIP suggestions, so I
believe I can help you regarding the Bangla support.

>Is there any already existing package we should include into the
>standard installation which provides better fonts?  

Yes! We have designed many ornamental OTF Bangla fonts by this time.
But one a few of them are build from the scratch. So you can include
the original fonts in your distro. They are: Mukti Narrow:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ekushey/MuktiNarrow2.ttf?download
(Best for UI and most of other Distro are using it) Sagar:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ekushey/Sagar0.6_GPL.ttf?download
Rupali:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ekushey/Rupali_2.ttf?download
Ekushey Sharifa:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ekushey/Sharifa.ttf?download There
are other fonts too at 'http://ekushey.sf.net' (http://ekushey.sf.net/)
but as they are not build from the scratch, adding them may make some
problem in future.

>That means you can install the fonts (by dragging them into
fonts:///
>?), but they are not actually used for rendering text on the desktop? 


Actually I could not install the fonts in the default font directory
(root problem), so I put my fonts in \home\omi\.fonts folder. The fonts
are working fine when I try to use them by selecting them in the
application end, but by default desktop applications (specially GTK)
uses \usr\share\fonts\truetype\freefont\FreeSans.ttf 's Bangla glyphs.
I believe that font doesn't have OpenType layout so that cannot render
all the characters well. So you have to put any of the above fonts on
your distro and declare the name to be use for Bangla.

> >I also found that the Firefox or Thunderbird is not Pango enabled
>Right, they are not proper Gnome programs.  

If so, then how come advance users are releasing stuff like
http://bunny.medhas.org/index.cgi/indic/firefox1.0.3.html and how come
Fedora delivers Pango enabled FireFox/Thunderbird with their releases.
Is there any problem to do such with Ubuntu?


Well I'm saying again that I'm not that advance in Linux. I used Linux
(Red Hat 4) for 3 days and now I'm using Ubuntu since last 15 days.

>> , so how come we are going to get Bangla or any other Indic
language
>> support? 
>Does it work any better with epiphany?  

I Didn't get you. What do you mean by  epiphany?

>It is the right place. The actual problem is that you are the first
>Bangla user who actually reports these problems, and none of the
>developers has experience with Bangla. So if you are willing to help
>us with that, we will try our best to improve Bangla support.  

Thank you Martin, Thanks a lot. Actually Ubuntu is getting popular day
by day as desktop OS. Perhaps this is not the right place for this
comment, but it should include some more entertainment software for
bringing more people's interest. Language support is secondary issue,
these days 80% people use computer for entertainment jobs specially in
the Asian countries. So if I had to change the source list for
installing Mp3 and DVD player then people will lost the interest for
using it.

Though Ubuntu is free, it is also possible to include total
entertainment solutions by paying some revenue to the patent owners.
Any ways Martin, If you are eager to help me then I'm here to make you
understand the problems.

Do you have any access to OpenOffice source? There are some problems
with OpenOffice and Bangla. My friends told me that Fedora fixed the
problem with their release and I think you can do so. Waiting for your
reply and in the next mail I'll try to tell you something about the
Keyboard layout of Bangladesh.


Regards

-- 
Omi Azad
Contributor
Bangla Computing and Localization Projects:
Ankur: http://www.ankurbangla.org
Ekushey: http://www.ekushey.org

](*,)


-- 
omiazad