Re: No malayalam glyphs in language/mlm-util.el

[Raja R Harinath <harinath@cs.umn.edu>]

Hi,

"Robert J. Chassell" <bob@rattlesnake.com> writes:

> Today's CVS snapshot, Fri, 2003 Feb 14  13:31 UTC
> GNU Emacs 21.3.50.146 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit)
> started with
>
>      /usr/local/bin/emacs -q --no-site-file --eval '(blink-cursor-mode 0)'
>
> The HELLO file now displays all its glyphs OK, including Hindi and
> Tamil; but I see empty boxes when I visit
>
>     emacs/lisp/language/mlm-util.el
>
> This file provides support for composing malayalam characters, which
> are Indian.

AFAI can make out, the variables 'malayalam-consonant' and the regexp
in 'malayalam-composable-pattern' use Unicode.  You need an Unicode
font that has glyphs in that range.  If your default font doesn't
have the correct stuff, you'll need in your .emacs

  (set-fontset-font (query-fontset (frame-parameter nil 'font))
      (cons (decode-char 'ucs ?\x0D00) (decode-char 'ucs ?\x0D7f))
      (cons "monotype-arial unicode ms" "iso10646-1"))

You can use any font that has Malayalam, and has it at the _right_
unicode code points, not some arbitrary encoding.  (Maybe emacs can
handle fonts with ISCII charset tables there.  I don't know.)  The
ISFOC TTF fonts that you already have don't appear to have the right
Unicode charset table (not surprising, since that appears to be the
whole point of ISFOC).

Scrolling further, you should see that 'mlm-char-glyph' has empty
boxes on the LHS of the table, but there must be proper glyphs on the
RHS -- those RHS entries are from the "malayalam-cdac" fonts.

Overall, the whole workflow of editing Unicode encoded Indic documents
in Emacs is not very smooth yet.

HTH,
- Hari
-- 
Raja R Harinath ------------------------------ harinath@cs.umn.edu