Hello Ananda, AMRS> I am interested in developing support for Kannada language (a South AMRS> Indian language) in LyX. Can anybody give me the hint regarding where to AMRS> start?
First, you'll need to get Kannada working in LaTeX, as LyX uses LaTeX for its paper output. The best solution would IMHO be Omega (a Unicode-enabled flavour of LaTeX), as there has been some work on major Indian scripts in Omega already. I'm not sure about Kannada, but Malayalam and Devanagari have been worked on. As soon as you've got a working version of LaTeX or Omega with Unicode Kannada support (which may or may not be possible with today's LaTeX packages), you'll need to get the following to work: * LyX & Unicode (this is in the queue AFAIK, but others on the list know better) (LyX uses 8-bit characters internally; there is CJK-LyX that has some support for multibyte characters, but it's not capable of doing the ligature combination and character reordering needed for Indic scripts) * A GTK2 interface for LyX (there is a Gnome interface already in the works, they'd probably appreciate any help; however, it'd have to be GTK2-based) As soon as this is in place, LyX will probably be intelligent enough to handle Kannada, and as a side effect, it'll handle next to all other Indian scripts as well. (Actually, at that point, it would handle most existing scripts, Indian or not, as long as there is LaTeX support for it) For the others: Kannada is a South Indian script; it falls into the general category of Indic scripts, which are characterized by the following features: * No 1:1 relation between character string and visual output, a bit like Arabic, but worse * Characters that appear in sequence XY in the input string may appear differently ordered (as YX) in the output string; however, character string order must be maintained for searching, sorting, indexing etc. * There is a rich set of ligatures (presentation forms for various sequences of characters) Practically the only display engine capable of handling Indic scripts on Unix is Pango (http://www.pango.org), upon which GTK2 is based. Cheers - Philipp Reichmuth mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Seeing my great fault / Through darkening blue windows / I begin again
