Dear Thomas / Praveen, First, let me apologize if my mails offended / discouraged anyone. I gathered the gist of the mail to be an attempt to input Malayalam to his wordprocessor, and NOT a DTP application.
Praveen, being such an active figure in SMC/L18N, would be an authority here and I agree to his points! ----- Original Message ---- > > 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. Popular, but non-standard? I was distracted by his wordings "to enter Malyalam to notepad" or something. You can, but won't it be displayed as mangled text? > > > 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 > I know. But would you encourage it "just to get work done"? > > 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. You've given an alternative at the end of your reply, viz, converting ASCII-encoded malayalam fonts to Unicode? > > 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/ Flawed, I agree, but a standard nonetheless? Flaws could be worked around, I believe, and people like you are working on it. You opt for INSFOC to Unicode? > > 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. > OK, thanks for clearing that. May bad! > > > > 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. I refrain to comment on that! > 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? >From what I understood, he was trying to input a complex letter using its number. I suggested he use an input method. Now, I realize he wants to use the said font to his DTP application. Wrong assumptions? > > 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. Pardon me if I sounded rude. But then again, my mistake. No offence taken. > 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. > +1 > 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 > +1 Best, Mahesh Aravind _______________________________________________ Indian Libre User Group Cochin Mailing List http://www.ilug-cochin.org/mailing-list/ http://mail.ilug-cochin.org/mailman/listinfo/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org #[email protected]
