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

[NMPOST7]

On 02/07/2012 14:33, Jonathan wrote:
> On 02.07.2012 12:56, 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?
> 
> That's an unhelpful and irrelevant remark. Until the most recent versions (10.7,
> possibly 10.6), Mac OS X did *not* have support for OpenType shaping of Indic
> scripts (and did not ship with AAT fonts for most Indic scripts - IIRC, only a
> few of the north Indian scripts were included).
As I am not well versed in this, I cannot comment. What I can say is my browsers
(safari, Firefox) do not display the fonts correctly. The ligatures are shown at
impossible places, making reading a sort of mental gymnastics.

>> In this third (christian) millennium Mac OS X has pretty good
>> OpenType support. You can try it for example in TextEdit.
> 
> The OP said he's using Leopard (OS X 10.5), in which case I don't believe Indic
> OpenType fonts are supported - the basic characters will render but without the
> proper shaping behavior. They do work properly on 10.7. (I forget whether 10.6
> included Malayalam support...).
I am using Leopard, 10.5.8 and I desperately need to update. else I am making my
own work an uphill task.

> This means that most text editors, including things like TextEdit and TeXShop,
> will not display the Malayalam Unicode text properly (even after installing an
> OpenType-enabled font); however, it will typeset properly in xelatex provided
> the font is loaded with fontspec and the proper [Script=Malayalam] option.
> It's possible that some third-party editors, including OpenOffice/LibreOffice
> and perhaps Mellel, may have better Indic OpenType support than OS X itself
> offered in the Leopard days. So a good combination might be to use LibreOffice
> as the text editor for a xelatex source file.
I am going to try a similar thing. I shall access my mm files, which will have
the unicode text and compile using xelatex.

> Better (but perhaps not an option, depending on hardware and finances) would be
> to upgrade to OS X 10.7 and thus gain support for Malayalam in TeXShop etc.
Well, I think I need to update.I shall check this straight away. My system is
about two years old and I presume, the hardware is still compatible. At least I
hope so.

Best regards
suren