Thursday, September 18, 2008

Samyak Devanagari is now Unicode 5.1 compatible!!!

All new characters added in Unicode 5.0, Unicode 5.1 are now in Samyak-Devanagari, now Samyak Devanagari fully support to Marathi, Hindi, Sindhi, Urdu, Maithili, Limbu and Konkani languages

Characters added are as follows U+0972 [ॲ], U+0971 [ॱ], U+097B[ॻ], U+097C[ॼ], U+097D[ॽ], U+097E[ॾ] and U+097F[ॿ]

Now no problem for writing ॲ[u0972] as previously people were typing अॅ [u0905+ u0945] but now ॲ is in Unicode as well as Samyak-Devanagari too

You can download and test samyak-fonts-1.2.1.tar.gz from http://sarovar.org/frs/?group_id=461
I think it will be in tomorrow fedora rawhide as well samyak-fonts-devanagari-1.2.1-1

Friday, September 05, 2008

Python tricks:

I was creating locale file for Sindhi using Arabic script, since locale file consist hex code of all characters and i got strings from linguist.
It was really very time consuming to check each character in Unicode code page and write its Unicode value, may be there some other good method but i followed this for sd_IN@Devanagari locale file since i am very familiar with Devanagari script.
but Arabic code page is very confusing, since Arabic words contains init, mid, final form of the characters, and Unicode chart contains standalone shape.
but from sometime i am working with python and tried following quick method:
In terminal
/******************************************/
$python
>>> w = 'شريمتي'
>>> w.decode("utf8")
u'\u0634\u0631\u064a\u0645\u062a\u064a'
/******************************************/
did same thing for almost 30 strings
so fast and accurate it is :)
whenever you will confuse with Unicode characters, just do this thing and directly check character information using Unicode value in chart.