[OS X TeX] Malayalam and other Indian languages on Mac

NMPOST7 nmpost7 at gmail.com
Mon Jul 2 14:10:14 CEST 2012


On 02/07/2012 13:56, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
> Am 02.07.2012 um 13:27 schrieb NMPOST7:
> 
>> I read somewhere that open type fonts do not function on Mac.
> 
> Was this on a Classic Mac OS lovers site?

Oh dear! I am not sure, any more.

> In this third (christian) millennium Mac OS X has pretty good OpenType support. 
You can try it for example in TextEdit. Or with Apache OpenOffice, which is not
Apple. Or XeTeX...
Well, it will be one of the (La)TeX forms. I not wish to use office
products.(La)Tex provides a clean and professional look.

> And you have to try it with Unicode, i.e., the proper Malayalam characters, not some strange 
combinations of Latin characters. But this is also served by XeTeX which allows
to apply a mapping
technique to substitute up to some Latin input characters with one output character
(for example: --- -> —). By creating such a mapping file and compiling it to TEC
format you might be
able to reuse your (non-standardised?) MM files.

To be very honest, I have never used Unicode directly, although the term is
known to me. It does sound strange (!) but is the  truth. I am going to deal
with this immediately, as using the language directly is a far better solution,
than using transliteration.

The first I shall do in this direction is to use the mm files, as they should
contain the said Unicode. At least it is a starting point.

Thank you Peter

best regards
suren



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