Re: Pango and Tamil

[M K Saravanan <mksarav@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran wrote:

> The gnome-tamil project also sounds real easy to do.  Just use
> AkaramTex editor, get the .po files from the site, write the
> translations and send it back to Dinesh.  Voila! Tamil gnome!

Technically nothing is there.  But in reality translating all the technical
terms (for which there is not tamil words currently) is challenging
task.  Those who are interested in translating .po files can join the
following mailing list to get help for the tech. terms in tamil:

kalaichol@xxxxxxxxxxx

especially i had a look of gimp.po file.. my god horrible tech. terms.  I
don't know how we are going to translate them into Tamil.The problem is when
we coin a reasonably suitable word for a new tech. term, tamil people will
come out with flames and strongly oppose it. new words will get familiarised
with the usage.  Does any TAMIL gurus are there in the list?  By the way is
anybody is interested in StarOffice l10n (into Tamil)?

> MSK, Do you have any ideas on Devanagiri support for KDE/GNOME or any

Things are very complicated with other Indian Lang..  Atleast for Tamil we
have TAB/TAM std. by TN govt. and TSCII. All the new works in tamil are mostly
being done in following these stds.  For other Indian Lang. eventhough ISCII
is there, except, CDAC no body is strictly following it.  So there is a
serious problem of which coding std. to use for other Indian Lang.  To add the
complexity further, for tamil fortunately, we have the same information in
both coding table and font file.  It is not so with other Indian Languages
especially with Devanagari.. think about the joint char. like "k-ka" appearing
in the word "Pakka" (where "k" is written with "ka" itself). the coding std.
will tell you about the codes of "k" and "ka" only it is the duty of the font
file to render them as a combined character. that's where both coding table
and font file info' differ.  Emerging font rendering tech. are coming up with
inbuilt mechanism for manipulating the combined characters.  Fortunately
all these rendering complex character business are very easy with
postscript fonts, but in WIN world who is using that? But it will take some
time.


-- mks --

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