rajeev joseph sebastian wrote:
Hi Rich Felker, I find your work to provide support for Indic text on console/terminal to be admirable, and yes, any kind of display is far better than none at all (and I do not consider your statement insulting) :) What I was referring to was a comment along the lines of "... have a set of wcwidth classes (say, 1, 2, and 3) and assign - glyphs - to one of those classes... ". (Please forgive me if I misunderstood the last few posts.) The word to note is "glyph". What I'm saying is you cannot in advance specify the width of any given conjunct. It may be different in different fonts. I suppose, we need to develop console specific fonts which can make proper use of the available width classes (or the structure you propose), however, I don't think any research has occurred in this regard.
Yes, Indic scripts like Malayalam need specific console fonts. I think for console applications legibility is more important that beauty.
Why not use the typefaces used in old-fashioned Indian typewriters as a starting point? Most of the popular mono-with fonts for Latin (Courier etc.) are based on typewriter faces.
Manual mechanical typewriters had a fixed advance width and the "resolution" was fairly low - a lot of care and expertise went into designing typefaces that were legible within these constraints.
I know typewriters made by companies like Remington were manufactured for most Indian scripts - and I suspect a lot of these machines are still around - so it shouldn't be too hard to come up with some type samples to use as a starting point.
- Chris -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
