[Indic-dev] Updates

[indic-dev@tug.org]

> 
>     yoga> we are at it and giri narayana and co have prepared for a
>     yoga> first draft of all the fonts. we now need to consult an
>     yoga> artist (we have located him but are looking for funds to pay
>     yoga> his proffessional charges!), 
> 
> How much it could be? Do you expect a large sum?

the last time we contacted him he had said around 25K for the artwork of
each font and he would be involved till they were put into metafont. i
will speak to him now and find out what he would charge. (i like this
artist because he was involved in font designing and knows lot about 
them; in fact he gave me a document prepared for a conference on
elctronic typesetting of south indian languages held in 1983!)
 
> That is great indeed. Creating type1 fonts from MF sources is not a
> big deal now. With TeXtrace you can achieve this provided your MF
> sources are perfect. Even if it is not as perfect as TeXtrace demands,
> we can seek assistance from Karel Piska (cf. 'Translation of MF Indic
> fonts into Type1' in TUG2002), who will only be happy to assist, I
> guess.

thanks a lot. i am counting on support which you could help us get.
 
>     yoga> also, we would like to take the kannada keyboard into
>     yoga> account. any suggestions in this regard are welcome.
> 
> Is it not a phonetic keying the best way to go, instead of assigning
> glyphs to non-intuitive keys in the roman key board (as CDAC has done,
> horrible IMHO).  The learning curve is too steep for it, while
> phonetic scheme is intuitive enough which means any novice can key in
> his data in his native language very easily. That is what we followed
> in Malayalam.

we would like to see if we can achieve both - phonetic as well as TVSE
kannada key board. our reasoning is as follows: one of the chief drawbacks
of phonetic approach is `speed' and if TeX has to go far this has to be
addressed. along with this consider the fact that there is a large
workforce trained in using kannada key board. so that is our aim: there is
a person who knows only kannada and he has a kannada document which he
wants to typeset and we would like to provide him with the necessary
tools. this facility is available for so many languages in the world -
arabic, chinese, japanese, ... but of course we dont want this to delay a
working kannada TeX and so will get out a phonetic thing out as soon as
the fonts are ready.
 
> This won't hurt your Unicode scheme in any way.  You may be aware that
> the free font 'Keli' of Hashim in Malayalam has been extended to
> Unicode as well by Raj by creating OpenType tables, thus making it
> available for any unicode aware application.  Further, yudit, the
> Unicode editor in Linux which supports many Indic scripts (I guess
> yudit supports Kannada too) relies on a phonetic entry scheme.

we would definitely like to meet raj and learn these things. (i wonder
when is my proposed trip to thiruvananthapuram materialise!)

regards.....................yoga