--- Savant shanti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi developers, > Can we write some sort of macro on AbiWord as > provided by the MS-Word 2000?
Well AbiWord now has Perl bindings for macros but this is not what we want in this case. > Actually I want to work out something of this > sort. > Any language fonts can be used in AbiWord, so in > order > to use AbiWord to type a document in some other > language basically we need a font with its keymap. Fonts and keymaps are two separate things. A keymap is part of the OS (or windowing system on *nix). And passes character codes to programs. Abi interprets these codes based on the locale, surely Unicode in the case of Assamese. When rendering text, strings are passed to the OS/Windowing APIs as a sequence of Unicode values. If we're rendering with a font that contains these values, our string will be rendered. If not, Abi currently displays a series of fallback characters. > In > Indic Languages (of which Assamese is also one) the > problem arises out of 'Juktashara'. 'Juktashara' is > another character which is a combination of two or > more characters. So what we need to do is > 'a+b'->'x'. > Thence can we write a simple program which looks up > an > array, whenever 'a+b' is typed, and replaces 'a+b' > with 'x' in document. In this way we can type a > document in 'Indic Languages'. > This way is just the display rendering. I mean > works only with a particular font and gives user a > feeling that he is working in that particular > language. > Please give comments and suggest ways of doing in > such a way if its possible. We probably don't want to handle this at the keyboard level. Because Indic languages have not been traditionally used on computers there are no 8-bit standards. This has allowed the current generation of OSes etc to come up with a "pure" Unicode method for handling these languages. Thanks to the wonders of OpenType we can have strings represented by a series of "logical" characters, leaving the OS render- ing engine to map these into glyphs. This is how Indic languages are being implemented and Windows 2000 has a good implementation. Doing things this way makes searching and sorting trivial. Having glyphs stored in the strings would be a nightmare and has proven tricky in other languages which were implemented this way before we had OpenType. Search around on the internet for "complex script", "indic script", "opentype", "freetype", "pango" and you should be able to find more detailed explanations. Hope this helps. Andrew Dunbar. ===== http://linguaphile.sourceforge.net http://www.abisource.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
