[Tugindia] TeX live CDROM/DVD

[S. venkataraman]

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 11:54 AM, Kannan Moudgalya <kannan at iitb.ac.in>wrote:

> Radhakrishnan CV wrote:
>
>> If you are looking forward to making available ISO images of a ready
>> to run CD, it might be great if you restrict to three popular systems
>> like gnu/linux, windows and os x.  CD can be customized to include
>> packages, fonts and related stuff which are relevant to indic
>> computing.
>>
>> Shall I direct people to contact you whenever TUGIndia receive
>> requests for TeXLive?
>>
> Yes.  Will be glad to be of service to the TeX community.  That is our way
> of saying thanks to all those who have helped make LaTeX such a wonderful
> system.  Regards.
>
> Kannan
>
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Texlive2009 already has coniderable resources for indic languages and the
only lacuna is the absence
of suitable opentype fonts.
I would like to share my experience in using xetex for hindi.  Xetex can use
opentype fonts.
I downloaded and used the Yogesh font from
http://tdil.mit.gov.in/download/GISTYogeshN.htm
 and used it with xetex.
I am not an expert in DTP, but as far as I could make out, the output was
quite
satisfactory.
 I spent a lot of time searching for opentype fonts that can be freely
downloaded.  Most of the fonts
I found did not have all the three families, viz normal, bold and italic.
There are many free fonts available, but many of them have only one family.
This is quite OK for
word processors, but not enough for xetex.
Even the Ubuntu(debian) package ttf-indic-fonts doesn't seem to have
truetype fonts with all
the three families. Of course they are not opentype fonts and may not be
unicode compliant.
In
http://www.ildc.in/htm/otfonts.htm
there are are lot of fonts available, but they come with a windows installer
and doen't seem useable on linux.
Also, Yogesh comes with a somewhat restrictive license agreement.  It can
be used only for Academic, R&D or non-commercial purposes.

So, it will be nice if opentype fonts for indian languages
 are made available with the customised versions of texlive2009
through some arrangement with  Department of
Information Technology or CDAC.
Also, if possible, we can remove support for all the languages except
english-uk, english-us and indic languages.  This will make installation
a little bit easier.
Best regards,
S. Venkataraman