[Fsf-india] Re: (Fwd) Re: [blug-lli] on Bengali fonts

[Radhakrishnan C V]

On Fri, 12 Apr 2002 at 10:00, baiju m wrote:

       It is possible to make documents with all character set in
       Malayalam using Hellingman's Malayalam package, but the output
       format will be in DVI,PS,PDF etc. Is any of these formats
       accepatable for Linux Documentation Project? any idea?

   >These formats are perfectly acceptable. What about this package ?
   >Could you give us more details ( free ?? , running in linux ?? )
   >
   >Mahendra
   
   I didn't tried Jeroen Hellingman's Malayalam TeX package yet. It
   is available at http://www.tug.org.in/indic.html And myself don't
   have much experiance with TeX (just created my B.Tech seminar
   report using LaTeX... thats all) If anybody else in this group
   know much about it we can make HOWTOs in PDF format. Now I have
   CC'ed this mail to C.V Radhakrishnan and Rajkumar. S at TUG
   India. If we can get any help from them that will be nice.

Indeed Indian TeX Users Group (TUGIndia) are only happy to assist
any such effort. By the way, Jeoren Hellingman's fonts are not
suitable for quality output although it deserves all 'kudos' for
being the first effort in Malayalam. TUGIndia have been successful
in getting a free Malayalam font in type1 format from PM Hashim that
will be released under GNU GPL within a week. Many thanks to Hashim
(Design Difference, Cochin)  for his brilliant efforts and kindness
to offer it to the user community. In the meantime, you can have a
look at

  http://www.tug.org.in/malayalam/doc/example.pdf

which is a typical example of how Malayalam can be typeset using TeX
and type1 fonts. Dont be bothered about the correctness of math
equations and formulae, it is just to show how math can easily be
integrated with text matter.

TUGIndia are on the way to make a repository of all the freely
available Indic fonts, pre-processors, supporting packages, etc at
   
  http://fonts.tug.org.in

which we hope to achieve within a fortnight. Technical assistance
through internet will also be extended to any user anywhere in the
world.

Again, coming to the problem of Malayalam package, I can assure that
the TeX packages, preprocessor, font definition/mapping files and
transcription schemes, etc which are nothing but extensions to
Jeoren's binaries/programs will be made available along with the up
and running of http://fonts.tug.org.in.

On a long term strategy, TUGIndia are also closely working with John
Plaice, primary author of Omega typesetting system which is a 16 bit
extension to TeX that allows to typeset all the world languages with
different writing directions/styles in a single document. 

Rajkumar of TUGIndia is closely working with the authors of 'yudit'
(free Unicode compliant editor) to integrate Indic scripts into
yudit. The next release of 'yudit' will have Malayalam support
builtin. Since Omega accepts unicode input, we are not far off to
typeset all the Indic scripts in a single document. Our experiments
to typeset Malayalam, Tamil, Devnagari, Farsi and English with Omega
had been remarkably successful. We're waiting for John's stable
release of Omega in the very near future.

Best.

-- 
Radhakrishnan

PS: I invite all of you to participate in the international
conference of TeX Users Group (TUG2002) at Trivandrum during Sep
4-7, 2002. Please have a look at:

  http://www.tug.org.in/tug2002