Internationalization - Devanagari

Internationalization - Devanagari

[Girish Kulkarni]

(I had posted this on gnu.emacs.help about a week ago but Eli
Zaretskii suggested this would be the proper place.)

Using GNU Emacs 22.1.1 on Ubuntu 7.04. I have a limited understanding
of fonts related issues in Linux, and three possibly naive questions:

 0. I installed the Intlfonts distribution today, to try out the
Devanagari font support in Emacs. The installation was okay, and I
also added the installation directory to the font path. The README
file that came with the distribution then says something like, "The
file Emacs.ap contains X resource setting of fontsets for various size
fonts (14, 16, 18, and 24 dots)." Could somebody explain this to me?

 1. I tried entering some Devanagari characters in an empty buffer
using a Devanagari ITRANS keyboard and found that now Emacs could
render them, but not quite correctly -- the ligatures do not form at
all. Devanagari ligatures is usually a hard issue everywhere; how has
Emacs solved it?

 2. Although my Emacs could render these few Devanagari characters
that I entered, it only showed  empty boxes in the HELLO file. Why did
this happen?

Maybe I should spend some more time with the Info pages on
internationalization. But it would be nice if somebody explains.

-- 
Girish Kulkarni - Allahabad, India - http://girish.50webs.com

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[Alok G. Singh]

On  7 Oct 2007, girish@hri.res.in wrote:

> Maybe I should spend some more time with the Info pages on
> internationalization. But it would be nice if somebody explains.

The only workable combination of Indic scripts and Emacs that I
managed is CDAC fonts with Emacs22 (at least). There seems to some
issue with the font encodings of the ttf Indic fonts generally
distributed. 

See emacswiki.org [1] for some details. The information might be dated
but should still work. Also the thread on linux-delhi [2] might be
useful.

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SupportHindi
[2]  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi/15841

-- 
Alok

//GO.SYSIN DD *, DOODAH, DOODAH

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[Richard Stallman]

We cannot recommend the use of the CDAC fonts unless they have become
free.  A few years ago, they were not.

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: alephnull@airtelbroadband.in (Alok G. Singh)
> Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:31:56 +0530
> 
> On  7 Oct 2007, girish@hri.res.in wrote:
> 
> > Maybe I should spend some more time with the Info pages on
> > internationalization. But it would be nice if somebody explains.
> 
> The only workable combination of Indic scripts and Emacs that I
> managed is CDAC fonts with Emacs22 (at least). There seems to some
> issue with the font encodings of the ttf Indic fonts generally
> distributed. 
> 
> See emacswiki.org [1] for some details. The information might be dated
> but should still work. Also the thread on linux-delhi [2] might be
> useful.
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SupportHindi
> [2]  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi/15841

Handa-san, could you please comment on this?  Are there other
alternatives?

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <u641cn2qk.fsf@gnu.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > From: alephnull@airtelbroadband.in (Alok G. Singh)
> > Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:31:56 +0530
> > 
> > On  7 Oct 2007, girish@hri.res.in wrote:
> > 
> > > Maybe I should spend some more time with the Info pages on
> > > internationalization. But it would be nice if somebody explains.
> > 
> > The only workable combination of Indic scripts and Emacs that I
> > managed is CDAC fonts with Emacs22 (at least). There seems to some
> > issue with the font encodings of the ttf Indic fonts generally
> > distributed. 
> > 
> > See emacswiki.org [1] for some details. The information might be dated
> > but should still work. Also the thread on linux-delhi [2] might be
> > useful.
> > 
> > Footnotes: 
> > [1]  http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/SupportHindi
> > [2]  http://article.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi/15841

> Handa-san, could you please comment on this?  Are there other
> alternatives?

That's true that currently Emacs can display Indic scripts
correctly only with CDAC fonts.  For emacs-unicode-2, I'm
working on supporting Indic (and the others) with OpenType
fonts.  I think the work can be done before the official
release of emacs-unicode (23.X or 24.1 ?).

---
Kenichi Handa
handa@m17n.org

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > We cannot recommend the use of the CDAC fonts unless they have become
 > free.  A few years ago, they were not.

Surely you can make an exception, to the extent of mentioning them,
for reading and writing!  Nobody can be truly free as in free speech
unless they are able to write without impediment.

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Richard Stallman writes:
>
>  > We cannot recommend the use of the CDAC fonts unless they have become
>  > free.  A few years ago, they were not.
>
> Surely you can make an exception, to the extent of mentioning them,
> for reading and writing!  Nobody can be truly free as in free speech
> unless they are able to write without impediment.

But there is no point in merely pretending one can write without
impediment when one can't.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Internationalization - Devanagari

[Richard Stallman]

    Surely you can make an exception, to the extent of mentioning them,
    for reading and writing!

The purpose of everything we do is the elimination of non-free
software.  It would be both hypocritical and self-defeating to
contradict ourselves by recommending the use of a non-free program.