[multikulti-tech] Red Hat Puts GPL On Five Indian Language Fonts

[Dan McQuillan]

hi

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Croome [mailto:chris at webarchitects.co.uk]

> Fedora 3 is due out on 8 Nov, should be interesting to see how it is
> with the Multikulti site :-)
> 
>   "Red Hat has released five Indian language fonts as open source,
>   licensed under the General Public License. The fonts named 'Lohit'
>   which means 'Red' in Sanskrit, are available in five Indian 
> languages
>   including Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil.  These fonts
>   will be available with Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

that sounds like excellent news!

mind you, fonts is one thing and correct rendering is another. 

last year i was in touch with Deepayan Sarkar of the bengalinux.org project. 
i asked him if the role played by usp10.dll on windows is played by pango on linux. 
he replied:
"That's more or less true, but not exactly. (In fact, pango on Windows uses 
usp10.dll.) usp10.dll (or Uniscribe) basically implements Opentype. This involves two 
things. Step one is analyzing the character stream and doing clustering and 
character reordering (things like identifying which sequence of characters 
will ultimately form a conjunct, splitting an o-vowel sign into a e-sign and 
aa-sign, etc). This first part has nothing to do with the font being used. 
This is followed by actually making some lookups in the opentype font, and 
then the font rasterizer displays the appropriate glyphs.
In Linux, the last part (doing the lookups and rasterizing) is almost always 
done using Freetype. But the first part has several different implementations 
-- e.g., pango (on which all GTK applications, including GNOME, are based), 
openoffice and Qt (on which KDE is based). All of them are currently buggy to 
some extent, and differ on how they do this step. The first two are 
reportedly based on ICU code (frankly, I'm not quite sure what that is). Qt 
is a comletely from scratch implementation."

there's been a bit opf discussion recently about related stuff on the urdu computing list  
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/urdu_computing/

so yes, it will be interesting to test with fedora 3!

dan

p.s. i only just downloaded/burnt the isos for fedroa 2. is that a bit of a waste of time? is fedroa 3 released/about to be released?