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
You are right there - showing the characters only according to their UTF/ASCII code is the primitive way of text display that most X apps and toolkits like tk is capable of. But using the advanced features of UTF which can understand predefined patterns of sequential characters, and display a special combined character instead, requires the GUI toolkit to have a certain amount of intelligence while rendering text. That is where old toolkits show their age. Right now i think pango is the most advanced among OSS toolkits in this field. Even QT i think is lagging in these features.
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).
Unfortunately, your toolkit (tk) seems to be the bottleneck. Try looking at TCL/GTK/Pango bindings. That is the only way, I think, you can get your app to display indic text perfectly. Even mozilla doesnt show hindi text perfectly because of this same problem. Current i18n efforts of mozilla project is concentrated a lot on integrating pango inside gecko.
You will get a far far more informed and factually correct explanation and solutions at the indlinux site. Some really remarkable men working there to solve similar problems as yours for India in general.
- Sandip
-- Sandip Bhattacharya http://www.sandipb.net sandip at puroga.com Puroga Technologies Pvt. Ltd. http://www.puroga.com
_______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
