[tug-summer-of-code] Extension of Unicode capabilities

[Sean Burke]

TUG,

    I would like to work on improving Unicode compliance within TeX and 
was hoping to receive some feedback on choosing a specific project and 
writing an application. I'm a linguistics student and Unicode compliance 
is thus a must-have for me. I have some experience working with Unicode 
data and algorithms and have, largely as a test for myself, written an 
implementation of the Unicode normalization algorithm.

    One idea I had was to work on implementing the Unicode Collation 
Algorithm but I'm not sure how important this is in the grand scheme of 
things. The bidi or line breaking algorithms would also be interesting 
projects and ones I would like to work on. As it stands, though, I'm not 
too sure about judging whether these would be the right amount of work 
for GSoC or which would be particularly useful. The one common thing 
that I think would be needed is a good way to integrate character 
properties in such a way that any of the given algorithms will be able 
to access the information they need. This alone I think would take a 
fair bit of careful planning.

    The remaining part of my purpose for writing this is to get a bit of 
guidance on writing up the application. Looking at the template, I find 
that I'm not really sure about how to specifically address tracking of 
progress and the mid-term evaluation. Would it be helpful to break the 
proposed project into milestones and describe some manner of assessing 
progress toward them? Feedback on this would be appreciated, especially 
from Mr. Muller.


Sean Burke