2010/8/26 Mahesh Aravind <[email protected]>:
> You gotta get a lot of things straight.

you too gotta get some of these things straight.

> 1) You *CANNOT* encode Malayalam in ASCII:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding

That is irrelevant. You can display Malayalam with ASCII encoding if
you map ASCII table to Malayalam characters and it is very popular.

> 2) ASCII doesn't support anything other than basic Latin:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

Again irrelevant, because for most people, all the need is to type and
print Malayalam. It does not matter how it is stored or if they can do
searching or sorting see http://pravi.livejournal.com/29283.html

> 3) Crude methods like ISCII are _obsolete_:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Script_Code_for_Information_Interchange

Again if that all we have for DTP in Malayalam, there is no choice.

> 4) Unicode rules: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_10646

Somewhat, the idea is great and there are some flaws in its
implementation http://www.j4v4m4n.in/2009/11/07/unicode-or-malayalam/

> LOL ^^ (I wonder HOW one would create "ASCII" "Malayalam" files using PM... 
> but
> anyway

Sometimes ignorance is a bliss.

> I humbly request you to *STOP* referring to ASCII. Maybe you might want to use
> an alternate term like "Plain text" file or something:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text

That is how it is referred and I suggest you read about difference
between character encoding and document formats. Plain text can be
ASCII or Unicode.

> All GNU/Linux systems support almost all character sets _including_ ASCII. You
> don't necessarily have to need ASCII to use Sribus or LaTeX or whatever.

Currently you can use only LaTex for typesetting Malayalam using
unicode. Scribus Indic rendering support is still a todo item. This is
a high priority project if we want to see more GNU/Linux adoption in a
popular market like DTP. Is anyone interested in working on this
project?

> You can't. The glyphs are auto generated in complex scripts like Malayalam.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malayalam_script

They are rendered from OpenType font's substitution tables. BTW, it is
conjunct or ligature not glyphs. Any character represented in picture
form is a Glyph. A ligature or conjuct is combination of more than one
character, but they are still glyphs.

>>Eg:- To input the character "ksha" you need to hold down "alt" key and then
>>press 0163 calculater keys, and when you release the "alt" key "ksha" will
>>appear. But instead of "ksha", here in UBUNTU the following character displays
>>"Ģ"

You can use an ibus/scim input method called "raw code" and input 0163
and get this behavior.

> I sincerely believe you got this "wrong habit" from Windoze Charmap where you
> hold down alt, and press number to see a character. Points to be clarified:
>
> 1) Windoze uses brain-dead ANSI charset (Windows-1252 for the uninitiated)
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1252

And some people just give random rands based on google search and
wikipedia and give expert opinions on topics which they have no clue
about.

> 2) GNU/Linux (mostly) prefers/uses/advocates Unicode
>
> The codepage in this case U+0163 is not in Malayalam range in UCS encoding;
> 0D00-0D7F is the Malayalam codepage range.

At least try to understand what the original poster is trying to say
before you try to shove in your wikipedia/google suggestions. ASCII is
a subset of unicode.

>>
>>Can  anybody help me to fix this? Is there any remedy to key-in ASCII text  in
>>Gnu/Linux. Even if ASCII is an obsolete method, there may be a  provision for 
>>it
>>
>>in GNU System, I hope!
>
> There is no fix. Folks correct me if I'm wrong here.

You are dead wrong and thinks ignorance is your birth right.

> You are trying to find a solution to a problem that is not a problem at all in
> the first place.

dude, did you understand anything at all about the problem the
original poster was trying to get help for before pronouncing him
brain-dead and likes?

> Do read, try to understand what you're dealing with. You need to input complex
> characters in OOo. That's automatically taken care of by the rendering engine:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_scripts

You are completely clueless about the topic we are discussing. OOo
cannot substitute a good DTP program, for your information it is an
office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation
components (there are others too)

Mahesh,

Try to understand what the problem is and you don't have to be rude in
your replies. I had to give this kind of a reply only because you
started it.

For everyone,

Indian language support in Scribus is a high priority project for Free
Software community in India. It would be a great Free Software
advancement if we can get this work done. So if anyone hates ASCII so
much, please volunteer to fix this.

After writing all of this, I agree with Mahesh that ASCII way of doing
Malayalam is a cheap trick and we need to move to Unicode.

Thomas,

If you can use Open Office word processing application for your needs,
use Unicode. For your existing documents you can use Payyans to
convert them to unicode.  For new text one option to have ASCII text
is to convert it back from Unicode using Payyans. Type your text as
unicode using any standard input methods available in GNU/Linux and
convert it to ASCII.

http://wiki.smc.org.in/Payyans

Thanks
-- 
പ്രവീണ്‍ അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില്‍
You have to keep reminding your government that you don't get your
rights from them; you give them permission to rule, only so long as
they follow the rules: laws and constitution.

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