Hi everyone. I just installed AbiWord 1.1.3 from the RPMs and I have to say I'm very impressed by the progress. Congratulations.
I'm trying to get the Bengali input method to work under gtk+. I use a plugin called imbeng, available from: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=43331 I fire up AbiWord under and Indian Bengali locale (LC_ALL=bn_IN.UTF-8 abiword-2.0 &) and change the font to a Bengali font (Mukti in this case but I don't think it matters). The Bengali input method is correctly chosen by default (i.e., if I right-click in the text entry area, it's selected under "Input Methods") and when I start typing, the appropriate Bengali characters come out. This already means that it's at least half-working, because the imbeng program is responsible for turning multiple keystrokes into multiple-keystroke characters. However, the characters don't glyph properly when I display them. There are two points here and I'll try to give some background. Bengali (and other Devanagari-based scripts) work in a system where each syllable in a word is represented by a glyph for a consonant (or a single glyph for a string of consonants if they are pronpounced together, such as "str" or "pl") and an attached glyph for the vowel that follows that consonant. (Words that start with a vowel get a separate starting-vowel glyph.) Depending on the vowel, sometimes the vowel sign comes to the left of the consonant, sometimes to the right. For example, "e" and "i" come to the left of the consonant in Bengali, "a" to the right, "u" below, and "o" on both sides. So, for example, if I type the Bengali word "sneho" (meaning "affection"), I should expect to get a glyph for "sn", and then the glyph for "e" which in this case comes to the left of the glyph for "sn." Instead, I get the glyph for s followed by the glyph for n, and the "i" to the right of it all. One thing that makes me think that this is an issue of rendering and not input: Each of the consonants (s and n), when it is displayed, is followed by a special Bengali punctuation marker underneath that sort of means "don't treat the next character as a separate syllable." So the proper way to render appears to involve combining consonants into one glyph when they are followed by this marker. Currently, gedit 2.0 renders this input method correctly. I also suspect that if this problem exists for Bengali, it probably exists for other Indian languages. I'm sorry I don't know more about the internals to be able to suggest precisely what's wrong. I hope this note is helpful anyway in pointing out a bug. For more information on rendering Bengali, you might wish to visit the Bengali Linux project at www.bengalinux.org and talk to one of the developers there, who may at least know how it works on gedit (which is their reference program). Although I'm not familiar with the programs, I can and do code; let me know if there is any way I can assist with this. Thanks, Tavis
