[ubuntu-in] Typing and more importantly reading in Malayalam

[Gora Mohanty]

Hi,
  Here is a systematic way of trying things. Could you come on IRC
tonight, or at some pre-arranged time to work on this?
1. Let us start with a single Malayalam font, and check the rendering
   on the system, before worrying about Indic-enabled browsers. If you
   are aware of which fonts provide Malayalam on your system, please
   remove them temporarily, and start with the Samyak font from 
<http://www.gnowledge.org/Gnoware/localization/Samyak_Font/new/Samyak_Malayalam.ttf>
2. After installing Samyak, show me the output of
     fc-list :lang-ml
3. The best Unicode editor that I have come across is yudit
   (http://www.yudit.org/), though it is not very efficient as an 
   editor. Install this, either by compiling it yourself, or from an
   Ubuntu package. yudit uses a configuration file, 
   ~/.yudit/yudit.properties. There is also a system-wide file, 
   /usr/share/yudit/config/yudit.properties, that is copied the first
   time you start up yudit. So, make the suggested change below to the
   system-wide file *before* starting yudit, or to the personal file
   of the user you are running as.
     Edit yudit.properties, find the line starting with,
   "yudit.font.TrueType=...", and append the name of the .ttf font file
   for Samyak, e.g., Samyak_Malayalam.ttf. To avoid confusion, I have
   attached my yudit.properties file that you can simply copy to the
   appropriate location.
     Make the font available to yudit. Copy the .ttf file to
   /usr/share/yudit/fonts, or make a symbolic link to where you have
   installed it in the system.
     Start up yudit. If you are using the yudit.properties file that
   I have attached, you should now see "TrueType" in the font tab
   (third from left), and "Malayalam" in the input tab. Else, do a
   shift+F2 for the font tab, and a F3 for the input tab, with the
   attached yudit.properties file. Now you should be able to type in
   Malayalam with a pseudo-phonetic (ITRANS) layout. If you prefer
   Inscript, use F2.
4. Ideally, one would check rendering with a comprehensive list of
   conjuncts in Malayalam, e.g., for an Oriya equivalent, see
   http://oriya.sarovar.org/or_conjuncts.html. While it can be time-
   consuming, and sometimes a contentious issuse, to come up with such
   a list, my personal feeling is that it is essential. Please let me
   know if you would be willing to type this up in yudit, which should
   render it correctly. It is sufficent to start with a list from a 
   dictionary, for example.
5. Armed with such a list, and what is hopefully a reference rendering
   from yudit, I, or someone else, could fix any bugs in Pango. If it
   is too much of a hassle to compile a complete list, you can type
   in snippets that have improper rendering, save the file as utf-8
   (default with yudit), and open it in gedit to investigate
   differences in rendering.
6. You can short-circuit some of this work by looking at how your
   browser renders examples at http://www.m17n.org/m17n-lib/. However,
   this uses yet another rendering library, m17n, and the short-
   circuiting skips enough steps that I hope you will understand if I
   do not have the time to help you out separately with that.

Regards,
Gora


		
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