Hi folks,

I'm trying to use an existing Tcl/tk-based software in linux (yellowdog
linux, running on an ibook), using Tcl/tk 8.4.5. The software runs a
behavioral experiment: we get human participants to read sentences
on the screen and record their reading time (using their key presses).
This is part of a study evaluating a computational model of human language
processing.

In one such experiment, I want to display Hindi (devanagari) characters.
So what I did was I installed and configured yudit (2.76), and used it (it
uses raghu.ttf, i.e. raghindi) to create a test file with utf-8 encoded
Devanagari script, which I tried to display through the experiment
software (Tcl/tk is apparently unicode compatible after 8.3.3).

However, although yudit can display everything correctly, the characters
don't display exactly as they should in the Tcl/tk software. Hindi, as you
know, has combining characters like the consonant-semivowel sequence "ky",
and these are showing up incorrectly (ka+halant+ya), and there are some
other problems.  See

ftp://ftp.coli.uni-sb.de/pub/people/vasishth/Hindi/hindi.png

for a simple example of the problems I've noticed so far.

Any thoughts on what the issue might be?  Does anyone know if Tcl/tk has
problems with combining characters and such like things in its unicode
compatibility? I am not sure whether it's a Tcl/tk problem (and what the
fix is) or whether it's a font problem (I tried many different TrueType
fonts for creating text in yudit, but the results were even worse), or
some other factor that I don't know about.

It's been suggested to me to switch to gtk/pango (i.e. rewrite the entire
software and just not use Tcl/tk), but at this point, because of time
constraints, that is just not an option (in the long run it may be).

I can provide more details if someone is able to help. I will also be in
Delhi Mar 7-16 if someone is able to help me out with this then (for
which I'd be very grateful :-).

If anyone is interested in reproducing the problem, I've provided a tar
gzipped file in the above ftp site with the entire setup. To run the
experiment software, do ./linger.tcl after tar zxf'ing in.

Thanks,

-- 
Shravan Vasishth                      Telefax (Home): +49 (0)6897 766144
Computational Linguistics, Universit�t des Saarlandes, Postfach 15 11 50
D-66041 Saarbr�cken, Germany         http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~vasishth


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