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

[Carthik Sharma]

On 3/30/06, Gora Mohanty <gora_mohanty at yahoo.co.in> wrote:
> 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.
>

Thanks Gora,

I will try this out immediately after I get back from a conference on
Monday. I will log into #ubuntu-in (as carthik) and we could meet
sometime there.

I will send you an email after I get back to let you know how this
goes for me, and when we can meet.

Thanks a LOT :)
Carthik.
> Regards,
> Gora
>
>
>
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--
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Central Florida
Homepage: http://carthik.net