Hindi (devanagari) problems with pango.

[Aditya Gilra <aditya_gilra yahoo com>]

||Shriharih||

God-Remembrance to all.

I have been following pango for 3 months now. First
many thanks to Robert Brady for his fine effort on
Hindi.

-------------
I downloaded the latest gtk-pango 0.17 but the new
grapheme deletion is all wrong.

Many of us use the ISCII encoding which is very
similar to Unicode, just a shift in the encoding
space. In ISCII (GIST) packages/terminals when you
backspace/delete a charater only one character gets
deleted not the complete grapheme.

As of now, for every one typo I will lose on an
average two-three characters in one go.

Please remove this feature. I don't know about the
other languages but for Hindi, it's no good.
Selection, cut & paste by grapheme is fine and should
be there but deletion by grapheme is horrible.

The previous pango 0.14 had its deletion very right.
The grapheme deletion is very contrary to what we use
in India.

-------------
Also, I found a ligature wrong and there may be more -
ka + halant + ra ligature is wrong.

For details I can zip and send a free true type
unicode font which will display fine in IE5.5 on
Windows. I haven't found any ligature wrong in this as
yet. Or get the font free with the free editor at
aksharmala.com But the editor doesn't use uniscribe so
no ligatures. But you can get the font to show
ligatures on IE5.5

I can also zip and send a Windows ISCII typing utility
with ttf font which can clear up how we in India do
our typing.
Or get it from 
http://www.tdil.gov.in/download/menu.htm
You'll need to register first.

--------------------------------

I have been breaking my head over this.
Please reply someone.
Can pango display true type / open type unicode fonts
with ligature information inside or will it only
display the bitmaps as it does now.

I couldn't get my aksdeva.ttf (based on xdvng) working
though it works on Windows. In fact ttmkfdir doesn't
even recognize it.

Will we have to wait for freetype layout to complete
or does/will pango support truetype/opentype on its
own. If so how and when.

Please reply the when part as we're waiting to convert
over 350 old Hindi religious books into UNicode Hindi
when you're done.

I work for a non-profit religious book publishing org.
www.gitapress.org

Best Regards and Hari Smaran,
Aditya Gilra.


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