Locales for Indic languages

[Ienup Sung]

] Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:25:48 +0200
] From: Roland Mainz <roland.mainz at nrubsig.org>
] Subject: Re: Locales for Indic languages
] 
] Leon Ho wrote:
] > Currently xorg does not covers all of the major locales in indic. They
] > are quite important for Indian users as those are major languages in
] > India. Is it possible to add Bengali, Gujarati and Punjabi into cvs?
] > 
] > The bug and patch are in:
] > http://freedesktop.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=860
] 
] Maybe Sun i18n staff should have a look at that... they have working
] Indic support in Solaris (even CTL support for XLFD-based fonts) ...

It is actually quite more than update on the locale.dir and the locale.alias
files unfortunately...

Solaris support multiple Indic scripts at UTF-8 locales, i.e., a single
UTF-8 locale supports Bengali, Devanagari, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Tamil,
Malayalam, Telugu and Kannada. At the moment we have a single Indic locale
called hi_IN.UTF-8.

Also, as some additional info, we have open sourced our XI18N including
XLC module and X locale definition files for UTF-8 locale quite sometime ago
at www.openi18n.org. In addition to that, to have Indic support done correctly,
i.e., Complex Text Layout support, there are five more components that
are needed:

1. X/Open Portable Layout Services interfaces (liblayout.so),
2. layout engine which we call it Universal Multiscript Layout Engine
(UMLE),
3. various Indic input methods and ancillaries,
4. Indic fonts, and,
5. XOM module that will harness, if you will, the above.

The above is a view/snapshot of what we have in Solaris today
for X11 CTL language support and they can be changed depending on how to
provide the solution. For instance, some of the above could be combined as
OpenType fonts and layout library (or similar) by the way.

Among them, #1 has been openly available quite many years as a sample
implementation and I *think* the PLS spec even has the sample implementation
source code in it possibly even though my memory might be cheating me
by now... The #2 isn't' opened. The #3, by the way, also needs IIIMF which is
also open sourced at www.openi18n.org; I also think that some of the Indic
input methods might have been opened as a part of IIIMF but I'm not sure.
For that, I cc'd Sriram (Indic input methods) and Hideki (IIMF). I also cc'd
Chookij for UMLE. I also cc'd Suresh and Sriram for additional Indic input
methods. For the #5, I cc'd Toshi.

With regards,

Ienup