[Tugindia] Development of IndicTeX

Duvvuri Venu Gopal tugindia@tug.org
10 Oct 2002 06:35:59 -0000


Ref. : My previous posting to the TUG India list

To my above posting we are receiving encouraging feed back from different persons. Still the number of persons involved in this discussion is very less – 4 – 5 only. The only consolation for me is that another person from Tiruchirapalli is also interested in TeluguTeX. Hope he may also participate in our efforts.

While searching the internet/www I came across the following documents which I found very useful. Later I learnt that some of these documents are already distributed with the TeX/LaTeX distribution as *.tex files. I am giving below the details:

1)	LaTeX 2e for class and package writers. The LaTeX3 Project, 1997.(clsguide.pdf)
2)	Standard Document Classes for LaTeX version 2e*. Leslie Lamport (1992) revised by Frank Mittelbach & Johannes Braams (1997).
3)	Standard Letter Document Class for LaTeX version 2e. Leslie Lamport, Frank Mittelbach and Rainer Sch\”opf. (1998).
4)	LaTeX2e font selection. LaTeX3 Project Team. 2000. (fntguide.tex)
5)	Configuration options for LaTeX2e. LaTeX3 Project Team. 2001. (cfgguide.tex)
6)	Modifying LaTeX. LaTeX3 Project Team. 1995. (modguide.tex)

No. (2) is nothing but the document.cls with explanation to code. The document.cls consists of  1339 lines of code! In the same way (3) explains the letter.cls and it contains 372 lines of code.

While going through ‘LaTeX2e font selection’ I found that every text fong in LaTeX has five attributes. They are – 
(1) Encoding : OT1 – TeX text; T1 – TeX extended text; OML : TeX math italic; OMS – TeX math symbols; OMX – TeX math large symbols; U – Unknown and L(xy) – A local encoding.
I want to know can we assign IN – Indic Fonts(?). Does the above code is hardwired into the TeX/LaTeX? Any permission from LaTeX3 group is needed?
(2) Family : cmr – Computer Modern Roman; cmss : Computer Modern Sans; cmex : computer modern Math extension; ptm – Adobe Times; phv – Adobe Helvitica etc.
Can we fit here dv – for Devnagari; tm – for Tamil, tl – for Telugu etc.?
(3) Series : m – Medium, b – Bo
 c – condensed.
We can follow this format as it is.
(4) Shape : n – Normal (that is ‘upright’ or ‘roman’); it – Italic;  sl – Slanted; sc Caps & small caps.
We can follow this format also as it is.
(5) Size -  size of the font.

Why I am suggesting this is that in TeluguTeX of Mukkavilli Lakshi the scheme she followed is – tel10.mf, tel10nx.mf (non-uniform on x-axis), tel10ny.mf (non-uniform on y-axis), tel10b.mf, tel10s.mf, tel11.mf, …. Etc. The largest font size is tel172.mf and there are 3 fancy fonts also. If we follow my above suggested pattern then the font names for telugu would be –
	tln10.mf, tlb10.mf, tlsl10.mf  etc.

Thank you for going through this.

D. Venu Gopal