[XeTeX] Kannada TeX package

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Shivashankar,

I'm moving the answer to the mailing list where other people will be
able to help you better than I can (please CC him).

On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Shiva Shankar wrote:
>
> Hi Mojca,
>
> My name is Shivashankar and I am from Srirangapatna, Karnataka, India. I wanted to enable kannada tex package (kanlel.sty) in babel. May I know how to begin. At present I don't have hyphenation pattern for kannada. Without hyphenation patterns is it possible to enable kannada tex in babel.

We do have hyphenation patterns for Kannada, but they only work in
XeTeX/XeLaTeX or LuaTeX/LuaLaTeX (but LuaTeX doesn't fully support
Indic scripts). There is also Kannada support available in
Polyglossia.

I don't know kanlel.sty (you should ask someone else about it and it
also doesn't seem to be part of TeX Live), but here's an example that
you should be able to compile with xelatex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\newfontfamily{\kannadafont}{Tunga} % or {[tunga.ttf]}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{kannada}
\begin{document}
ಏನಿದು ಲಾಟೆಕ್! ಗೊತ್ತಾ ನಿಮಗೆ?
\end{document}

The example was borrowed from
http://choorucode.com/2010/01/06/tex-kannada-using-xetex/ with added
Polyglossia support.

I tried to add some longer text from Wikipedia and it seems to hyphenate.

> If we need to learn more about TeX or LaTeX from where to start. Is there any book on LaTeX programming?

I leave that question to others.

> Regards
> Shivashankar
> Sriranga Digital Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd.,
> Srirangapatna

Mojca