Here a FWD (with permission) to discuss the problem of Indian fonts support in GRASS. I wonder if the new fond infrastructure helps in this regards.
additional message from jitendra: > Please do give your critical comments on the website > www.pcmcgisda.org.in Markus ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: jitendra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Aug 10, 2007 7:23 PM Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Grass to Indian languages : Challenges To: Ravi Vundavalli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], Swapnil Hajare <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Dear Ravi, it is true that we had started translating grass (version 5.1 onwards ) into Hindi and marathi around the time of the birth of indictrans i.e circa 2003 as volunteers. However we couldnot keep pace and did find major changes coming up . In fact during 2004-2005, as a part of central govt project janabhaaratii, we had plans to translate grass on professional payment basis in 6 indian languages. But that too was not to be. My technical guru Swapnil had this to say," "We had attempted localization of GRASS GIS earlier. The existing translations for Hindi and Marathi are done by me only. But we stopped doing that mainly because we thought there is no point in translating interface in absence of support for rendering the indic text. GRASS uses Tcl/Tk for interface which doesnt have support for rendering Unicode Indic text. So even if we translate the po file, it won't be displayed properly. More important thing which I was more attracted to was to add support for Indic text label rendering in d.text.freetype (see http://indictrans.in/~swapnil/grass_indix2_20051201.png ). I had done this using Indix2 library which unfortunately is no more developed and is not available on Xorg (it only works on XFree86 < 4.1). So I was going to implement the same solution using widely used Indic rendering engine such as Pango or Qt. " My take on this is another short term solution pending a better solution . This is assuming that tcl/tk can render multibyte ttf font. If so, we can convert the text in unicode ( normally encoded to support opentype fonts which have a rendering program as part of the font) into another font (we call it setu series) , and use the same for display. There is as of now no support for input in setu. A program is available to convert the text from usual unicode to setu unicode. This will entail hardcoding the font setu with grass tcl/tk script. This font has been developed for devanagari but can be developed for all indian languages. The result of this approach can be seen on www.pcmcgisda.org.in where we have mapserver map labels in devanagari . This is a problem for all graphic programs which have been internationalised for CJK with multibyte unicode fonts but have no support for opentype. If osgeo (international or india )can financially support this work, we can put some effort to find a short term quick fix, get translations done systematically work towards a long term solution by proposing a research program If we put together a good effort and get support from grass developers, We can even write a proposal for support from the Government of India for research efforts for adding all indian language support . I am confident we can get the support as egovrnance inititives require GIS very intensely and widely. I have seen the bright eyes of many bureacrats who have seen the indian language on maps on the web to be so confident. warm regards jitendra _______________________________________________ grass-dev mailing list [email protected] http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grass-dev
