Fedora shows Tofu (Square Box/Dabba) for following Unicode scripts

Was just going through GUCharmap to check how many scripts are still not covered with the default fonts installation of Fedora. Still number of fonts required to remove Square-Box/Tofu/डब्बा/ and provide at least single font for each script of Unicode. Though i think NBMP ( non basic multilingual plane script) is not high priority target first but at least other script on BMP which are in active use must be supported.

Thought it will take long time.

Below is the list from GUCharmap showing for scripts represented as  Tofu/SquareBox :)

Missing fonts in fedora

- Avestan
- Balinese
- Bamum
- Batak
- Brahmi
- Buhid
- Carian
- Chakma  - NBMP
- Cham
- Cuneiform
- Cypriot - NBMP
- Deseret - NBMP (supported by noto)
- Egyptian Heiroglyphs - NBMP
- Imperial Aramaic - NBMP
- Inscriptional Pahlavi - NBMP
- Inscriptional Parthian - NBMP
- Javanese
- Kaithi - NBMP
- Kharoshthi - NBMP
- Limbu - NBMP
- Lisu
- Lycian - NBMP
- Lydian - NBMP
- Mandaic - NBMP
- Meroitic Cursive - NMBP
- Meroitic Hieroglyphs - NBMP
- Miao - NBMP
- Mangolian
- New Tai Lue
- Ol Chiki
- Old South Arabian - NBMP
- Old Turkic - NBMP
- Phags Pa - NBMP
- Rejang
- Samaritan
- Saurashtra
- Sharda - NBMP
- Shavin - NBMP
- Sora Sompeng - NBMP
- Sundanese
- Syloti  Nagri
- Tagalog
- Tagbanwa
- Tai Tham
- Tai Viet
- Takri - NBMP

While comparing this with Google's noto fonts, they have provided fonts for some of the scripts in the above list. Will add those to Fedora soon.

Resolved Lohit Oriya rendering issues with Harfbuzz NG

Couple of weeks back got to know there are some combination of Oriya breaking with Harfbuzz. Bug [1] was earlier reported against Zanata but later on with further review understood it is actually font problem.

Cross checking with Windows found those are breaking with Uniscribe as well.

One of that combination was 123 Gsub listed at UTTRS[1]

 ର୍ତ୍ତ  (U+0B30 U+0B4D U+0B24 U+0B4D U+0B24)

Reph was not allowing to form expected ligature

Same way there are some other combination like 52 ( ଞ୍ଜ)

If someone type ି or ୈ,  It was not allowing to form expected ligature.

Fixed these combinations in upstream now.  [2]
Build lohit-oriya-fonts-2.5.3-3.fc18 will be available in tomorrow update-testing repo. [3]


Fedora language testing day is planned on 2013-05-02 [4]


If none more issues get reported during this test day, i will do next release of lohit-oriya that is 2.5.4.


[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=923215
[2] http://utrrs-testing.rhcloud.com/language/or/gsub            
[3] https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/lohit.git/commit/?id=28986ab3956df5cb96c3ec383641f1cb0fa4c04a   
[4] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/lohit-oriya-fonts-2.5.3-3.fc18
[5] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2013-05-02_Localization_%28i18n%29

My view on Automated_Rendering_Testing idea for GSoc from SMC

Just couple of days someone ask my view on this project. Today got some time to go through it, below are my comments.

Project idea is written her http://wiki.smc.org.in/SoC/2013/Project_ideas#Automated_Rendering_Testing

1. I really like that someone picked this idea for GSoC. This is something we are looking from long time in UTRRS.
    UTRRS has one basic drawback that manual intervention is needed to get actual rendering problem.
    So if some intelligent algorithm program can automatically verify standard images and on the fly generated image from font to be tested and provide comparison that will be simply great.

    When i gone through project title i thought this is going to be happen in this project.

    I am not sure what is exact plan for implementation.

2. It is written in project idea "One method to do this might be to check the order of glyphs/glyph index output by the rendering engine - this depends on the font too."

   Actually in Harfbuzz we are already doing this thing with scripting.  Behdad has implemented best testing suite for testing rendering of complex script. It happnes following way.

  Script first passes particular word and font to be tested to Uniscribe. It returns some glyphs id's/hex values in fonts.

  Then script passes same word and font to Harfbuzz. It also returns some glyphs id/hex values in fonts.

   Assuming fonts works 100% perfect in Uniscribe and considering it as a standard output. If harfbuzz output (hex values) matches with uniscribe (hex values) it means it is rendering perfect else test fails.

  With this method in harfbuzz we already automatically testing millions of words.

3. In my humble opinion this project should be plan with my first point. I do agree it is tough and might be bit research kind but i think that is the right way. Harfbuzz is already doing automates rendering testing by passing values to unscribe and other open type layout engines.

Open source language summit 2013 at Red Hat Pune and Me

Almost at the end of second day of Open source language summit at Red Hat Pune more details regarding it are available at [1]

This blog is specifically for the things on which i worked on in this summit.

1. Standard for Open font format for script of India
It is available at [2] in very initial stage right now. With this document we are trying to improve Indian language fonts development experience of Typographers or Font Designers.
But how? good question :)

See today number of Latin fonts available freely and also in open source environment but not Indian fonts number in that strength.

Agree there might be many reasons but one of that is complexity of development OFF fonts. Unlike Latin it is not simply design but also handling complex script features like reordering, ligature and understanding open font format.

We are planning to make this standard document so easy and simply that anybody want to develop font can simply design shapes required for script and follow some easy steps by referring references fonts like Lohit and done.

Though long road ahead but i am sure this step is in right way !!

2. Lohit fonts will be available as a Web fonts from upstream itself

Completed all work from updating Makefile in Lohit upstream (Thanks parag again for initial work :))

Got some useful information from Santhosh regarding sfntly tool from google for generating .eot and .woff

So from now onwards no need to rebuild lohit in other font format for using it as a Webfonts, just use lohit-

Liberation 2.0 and Liberatoin 1.0 comparisons

 Liberation 2.0 is one of the feature of Fedora 18. but Below are some comparison screenshots between liberation 2.0 and liberation 1. See the at smaller sizes and higher sizes output is same.

Liberation Mono 1.0  Vs Liberation Mono 2.0

Liberation Mono Regular 2.0

Liberation Mono Bold 1.0

Liberation Mono Bold 2.0

Liberation Sans Regular 1.0

Liberation Sans Regular 2.0

Liberation Sans Bold 1.0

Liberation Sans Bold 2.0

Liberation Serif Regular 1.0

Liberation Serif Regular 2.0

Liberation Serif Bold 1.0

Liberation Serif Bold 2.0

Indian internationalization enhancements in Fedora 17

    Yesterday Fedora 17 Beefly Miracle got released and this is time to update on enhancement and new features of Indian languages.

Indian official 22 language support
    This is one i am aiming from long time and glad to tell you achieved this in Fedora 17. Now we support i18n for all these language. This is definitely one of the major achievement by Indian open source community.
    We now have fonts, rendering support (mostly new languages are based on Devanagari ), Input methods (Inscript and for some inscript2)

Challenges we faced

• CLDR
  - Most important part we were looking for locale data. Unfortunately we do not have much active contributors for missing languages in opensource community.
  - So searching them was big pain. Lucky enough finally found some. Got Bodo locale from Unicode CLDR itself.

• Fonts
  - Lucky enough new languages are using Devanagari scripts as well, so some minor fixes in Lohit Devanagari made it compatible with newly added language.

• Input method
  - We do have inscript layout for most of the language. Missing languages layout is standardize with the Enhanced inscript kayboard development.

• Fontconfig
  - Fonts were not getting selected for languages due to improper or missing orthography file, special thanks to tagoh for taking time to review all ortho file and commit it in upstream.

Unicode 6.0 compatibility for supported script

• Lohit fonts now supports Unicode 6.0

Details available at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/IndicUnicode6

english-typing-booster
    English Typing Booster is a predictive input method for the ibus platform. It predicts complete words based on partial input. One can then simply select the desired word from a list of suggestions and improve one's typing speed and spelling.
    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/english-typing-booster


Enhanced inscript layout
    I do agree the standard is still in Draft stage. It almost two year we are waiting for getting it release as a standard.
    Inscript2 has some major enhancements over the existing keyboard. This will give community a better chance to test and provide feedback.
    Also inscript2 support more languages, so at least we can make it available to community having no standard for input method yet.
    Example: Kashmiri in Devanagari
     More information at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Inscript2_Keymaps

Font configuration tool
   This one many people are waiting for long time.
    Many time users do not like default system fonts, they either want to change it with some downloaded fonts. This tool allows them to do it.
    Just download font, install it. Run fonts-tweak-tool and select font under particular category and ok. 
    It will create custom fontconfig file for users, and user will get selected font for language as a default. Yahoooooooo!!
       More information at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FontConfigurationTool

Other improvement

• Language specific Lohit fonts for  Nepali and Marathi
  - We were using Lohit Devanagari for these languages early with locl feature of Open type fonts. Still 'locl' feature does not work well with most of the rendering engine.
  - As well users in India use to be in en_US locale.So now provided fonts Lohit-Marathi and Lohit-Nepali users can get there expected localize shape without any dependency.
• smc-fonts
  - SMC community has done improvements and resolved bugs in Meera, Rachana and other fonts. These are available in Fedora 17.
• Fonts for kannada
  - navilu and gubbi fonts are now available in Fedora. If anyone wants to use this as a default for Kannada just do it with fonts-tweak-tool.
• Indic typing booster
  - Major news it is now supporting Bengali language with Probhat, itrans and inscript layout. Do give it try. Enhancements for presently supported languages.

Road ahead

• Following languages are written in multiple script, we are presently supporting it in Devanagari so need to support in other scripts as well.
• Santhali (Ol Chiki)
• Manipuri (Meetei Mayek)
• In Fedora 18 we are going with ibus-hunspell-table, it uses better architecture for predictive text input method than existing typing booster. 
• More efficient by using hunspell dictionary in backend. At one go it support all m17n layout.
• It supports all languages available in hunspell
• Liberation fonts with better license.
• This is from my side i am sure there are many more :)

Soon releasing Lohit Marathi

Today is "International Mother Language Day" and what more i can do for my mother tongue than announcing soon release of Lohit-Marathi with the shapes specifically required for Marathi writing.

From Long time we are using Lohit Devanagari which is generic for all languages using Devanagari script. Recently found official document showing Marathi language need some specific shapes different than other languages like Hindi @ Bug (discussion happened during wikimedia hackthon and meet with redhat i18n team)

Official Document available at http://www.maharashtra.gov.in/GR/Marathi/2009/11/06/20091106130447001.pdf

Within next couple of week will release it, so people on any Linux or windows can install it and enjoy truly Marathi Lohit font.

Resolved bug in Rachana font

Just resolved one bug of Rachana font.
Below is list of Malayalam Unicode characters

"ം ഃ ഄ അ ആ ഇ ഈ ഉ ഊ ഋ ഌ ഍ എ ഏ ഐ ഑ ഒ ഓ ഔ ക ഖ ഗ ഘ ങ ച ഛ ജ ഝ ഞ ട ഠ ഡ ഢ ണ ത ഥ ദ ധ ന ഩ പ ഫ ബ ഭ മ യ ര റ ല ള ഴ വ ശ ഷ സ ഹ ഺ ഻ ഼ ഽ ാ ി ീ ു ൂ ൃ ൄ ൅ െ േ ൈ ൉ ൊ ോ ൌ ് ൎ ൏ ൐ ൑ ൒ ൓ ൔ ൕ ൖ ൗ ൘ ൙ ൚ ൛ ൜ ൝ ൞ ൟ ൠ ൡ ൢ ൣ ൤ ൥ ൦ ൧ ൨ ൩ ൪ ൫ ൬ ൭ ൮ ൯ ൰ ൱ ൲ ൳ ൴ ൵ ൶ ൷ ൸ ൹ ൺ ൻ ർ ൽ ൾ ൿ "

Before fix it was looking like, Note, U+00AE character is displayed even at reserved unicode locations, was not understanding from where ® is coming after checking through all font understood in Rachana.ttf these glyphs present.

After Fix

Reported bug : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=781938
patch is available in bug. Pushed update to Fedora 16 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/smc-fonts-4.4-7.fc16

Added Bengali language support in Indic typing booster

   Finally done with Bengali support for indic-typing-booster, working from last 5-6 days, actually we could have done this yesterday itself but initially i thought probhat (mostly used in community) is phonetic layout like itrans but later understood it is one-to-one mapping layout. So thought its better if to add phonetic layout as well since mostly new user find phonetic layout more user friendly.

   Hunspell word list made life little bit easy, but its huge wordlist around 3Lakh (.3 Million), not sure how much actually useful for Booster IME. If we can delete few words not related or very similar it can help to reduce Database size. Will discuss this in Bengali community and will take some inputs.

   Unlike first released of other language, from onward User no need to install all layouts rpm together, done sub-packaging in spec file. Users familiar with Probhat should install bengali-typing-booster-probhat, users familiar with inscript should install bengali-typing-booster-inscript and phonetic one should install bengali-typing-booster-phonetic. Considering db size hoping this will help to reduce download and install size. Rpm's are available at koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3608241, scratch build. Raised Fedora new package request hoping to get quick review and build it for Fedora 17 and Fedora 16
   This is Beta release 0.9.0, with some bugfixes and comment will release 1.0.0 soon.

Wikimedia hackthon 1st day

Amazed with the passion and spirit of wikimedia team during hackthon. Eric gave good starting explanation of basic things of wikimedia and other ongoing activities, such that offline support, mobile support, internationalization.

Hackthon project list was excellent http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011#Topics

I was interested in all but since all activities were parallel thought better to check Lohit fonts support for remaining Indian languages.

I was the leader for font testing activity http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#I18N
Glad to see 4-5 hackthon attendees shown there interest in font testing.

Pre lunch session went in introduction of project, group forming etc. Actual work start after lunch.

first 1 hrs i was just enabling students OS for Indian language, couple of had Fedora in there machine so did it quickly, santhosh helped for enabling Ubuntu for Indian languages.

It was great to see there expression's when they actually started writing in Indian languages. One of attendees (Jatin) father works in CIIL :)

Then explained students important of activity they are going to do, then finally we started.
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/LohitFonts This is the page where finally we put all the testing reports.

In between we had good offline discussion regarding Lohit Tamil fonts, Discussion with Amir regarding on 1 language 2 script problem.

Ended first session with Group Photo  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Hackathon_Mumbai_2011_Groupshot.jpg
 

My 1st day at Wiki conference at Mumbai university

  First thing notices is the security, did not allowed anyone without checking it photo ID and wiki invitation, even inside university there was good security. (Many Police)    

  Later understood this is due to controversy created by BJP http://www.newsreporter.in/bjp-youth-activists-detained-for-protest-against-wikipedia anyway that's other part.     

  From last couple of days seeing excellent coverage by media for wiki conference(even there was new in local Marathi language newspaper Sakal) and same noticed even in conference. First row was mostly occupied by Media.     

  University convocation hall was small compared to COEP Pune conference hall, it proved land/space crunch in Mumbai. ;)    

  Met with Ramki and Santosh and introduction with wikimedia developer. I was interested in attending tech talk session but seminar hall was full, even few people sat on ground. So went outside and had good discussion on indic computing issues and plan for hackthon. Problems and development of Lohit fonts.
     
  Attended Post lunch session about introduction of wikipedia, in that understood wikipedia also facing same problem, we faced 1 year back, one language multiple script, so asked question regarding same in Q&A. I think they are planning good to transliterate language content of one script to another script, so it will save lots of effort and will help people knowing either of language. Since limited time decided to take further discussion offline, so will discuss more in tomorrow's hackthon session.     

  From couple of session i attended wikipedia made it clear regarding there high priority task is to provide fonts, input method for at least 22 official languages of India. It is like providing food. cloth and shelter Only few are missing though, i am working on this from last 1-2 year and my dream to announce sometime "Fedora now support all 22 Indian languages", only 4-5 language support is remaining now major part is testing and confirming the support, so in tomorrow's hackthon planning to highlight this testing points. If any bugs raised i am definitely there to fix. I am sure withing next 5-6 month we will able to announce support for 22 Official Indian languages.
     
  Second part was discussion with the attendees, met with dhananjay Aditya, saw him while discussing regarding adding pali language contents in wikipedia with "Alolita sharma". I am also very interested in doing something for Pali language, we have lots of great Buddhism content available in Pali language and high time to digitize it. Had good discussion with Dhananjay he is very passionate regarding Pali looking forward to work with him together in between Dhananjay is Admin of "Superstition Eradication Committee" http://www.facebook.com/groups/ansindia/ and very active in many activities.           Was interested in showing i18n development, specifically Marathi language to IBN lokmat representative Amruta, gave 5-10 explanation to her. Lets see if anything happen positive for raising awareness of Open Source indic language computing activities.

Fudcon second day

    It was excellent day, unfortunately was not able to attend till last session. Started with the session on Fedora security, it was interesting and definitely fedora user felt proud to see effort of security team.

    My session with Anish was from 2 to 3 PM at seminar hall 2, started bit late since it was experience from first day that audience need some time to change rooms. It was about 20-25 audience but good part was most of them were interested in doing something for Indian language computing.
    Session was very interactive. following questions were raised during session.
    1. Can we add barah layout support? i think yes we can
    2. Since same data used across different users, is there any chance is privacy issues? No. since each user will have separate user db saved in his home folder
    3. is this available in debian? still not need one packager, but still one can install and use it on ubuntu and debian easily since ibus is already there.
    Best part was when in session after showing demo and architecture we asked regarding Advantages of Booster ime, audience able to tell its advantages perfectly.
    Sessions slides are available on fudcon.in.
    Outcome: Had good interaction with all. Decided some project to work with students. Looking forward to sometime visit COEP again and actually work on some task with student.        
Thanks fudcon for giving me this opportunity.

Excellent first day at Funcon 11 in Pune!!

    Jared smith gave excellent talk on Fedora and motivated lot to student to come forward and start contribution. He explain just using in not means contribution to community but one should come forward and report bugs give some feedback is taken very well.
    Saw many desktop powered by Fedora 15, gnome 3 :)
    Amit shah's session on git was very interactive and i think it was required some more time but yes he managed well in available time.
    Had a small running chat with Jared smith, briefed him on Fedora indic i18n activities and number of Indian languages and script. (Lohit fonts). Will be good if tomorrow get some time i can show some demos to him.
    Met with Prof Abhijit (COEP) was interested in meeting him from long time. He is great supported and promoter of opensource. I had meeting with some of his project student working on Gnome Terminal indic rendering stuff. Had a nice talk on indic language computing project. There is still lots of things to do and that also interesting for Computer science student. Will give show project demos and plan for some project tomorrow.
     Big news came after lunch with the Inauguration of fuel website, it is done by Satish Mohan. There are many open task for student do go through it if one wants to learn and contribute in opensource.
    Attended talk Vaidik kapoor's on how development of Fudcon.in  happened Case study was great and overall excellent work in limited time. I am sure we will do great next time and can use same experience for other such events. COD with Drupal is really excellent module for developing event website. Liked this session.
    Last talk of Aman was nice, He explained Fedora QA process very nicely. Still i think there need some motivation for students to test and reports bugs for Fedora. May be in Fedora new somewhere name regarding the person name with number of bugs he reported.
    My session is tomorrow and very excited about it.

Pravin Satpute
Fedora i18n team

Soon bodo (brx_IN) locale will be available in glibc

few days back saw note on tdil-dc.in regarding submission on Bodo language locale in Unicode CLDR.

found it www.unicode.org/cldr/trac/browser/trunk/common/main/brx.xml

bug for glibc http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13282

Sanjib Narzary and me working on this. Hoping soon glibc will push in in upstream git repo

Nastaleeq script font now available in Fedora

  Just completed packaging of Urdu Arabic script fonts from CRULP for Fedora. Good news is now Fedora has fonts for Nastaleeq script as well.
  Following is its view with Harfbuzz NG

  Looks good to me, might be person belonging to Arabic script can comment more on same.

   Following are the name of packages added to Fedora.

nafees-naskh-fonts-2.01-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-nastaleeq-fonts-1.02-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-tehreer-naskh-fonts-1.0-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-riqa-fonts-1.0-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-pakistani-naskh-fonts-2.01-2.fc15.noarch

  cheers..

Indic internationalization new developments and improvement in Fedora 15 (Lovelock)

   Fedora 15 (Lovelock)  got release with excellent Gnome shell. I liked gnome-shell so much that i have started using it after F15 Beta release itself ;)
   I am writing some of the noticeable development and improvement specially from indic internationalization point of view in F15.

1) New Indian Rupee Symbol

    Jul 15, 2010 Govt. of India announced about New INR symbol, http://blog.foradian.com/ made a mess by adding it on non-standard (on ) codepoint in excitement.

 During Fedora 15 Development cycle Unicode approved U+20B9 to New INR symbol and it is available in Unicode 6.0 (i guess quickest one in Unicode history thanks to DIT)

 On Qwerty keyboard AltGr+4 (Right Alt Key) allocated to it.

 Now Fedora 15 supports it and most importantly with Standardize way !!

Question: How to use it?

Ans: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/RupeeSign#How_To_Test

2) Indic Typing Booster

     This is predictive text input method for Indian languages, presently it supports Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati with itrans and Inscript layout. (Other languages will get supported soon)

    Though this is in Alpha stage it has great potential and presently in active development stage. Do give a try to this.
    Screencast of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTYNVP7p-xY

3) New Fonts packages:

i) pagul-fonts:
    A TrueType Font, which allows you to read and write in Saurashtra Script.

 ii) tabish-eeyek-fonts:

    A TrueType Font, which allows you to read and write in Meetei Mayek script.

Note: Pagul and tabish both are in Fedora 15 testing repo, install it with
$sudo yum install --enablerepo=updates-testing  pagul-fonts tabish-eeyek-fonts

 iii) nhn-nanum-fonts:

    Nanum fonts are collection of commonly-used Myeongjo and Gothic Korean font families, designed by Sandoll Communication and Fontrix. The publisher is NHN Corporation.

 iv) nhn-nanum-gothic-coding-fonts:

    Nanum Gothic Coding fonts are set of Gothic Korean font faces suitable for source code editing, designed by Sandoll Communication and published by NHN Corporation.

 v) thai-arundina-fonts:

    Arundina fonts were created aiming at Bitstream Vera / Dejavu compatibility, under SIPA's initiation. They were then further modified by TLWG for certain aspects, such as Latin glyph size compatibility and OpenType conformance.

3) Indic Rendering Improvement:

Lohit Devanagari Release 2.4.5:

          Added new ligature द्ध्र्य , Resolved shirorekha problem ग्मि, Customized glyphs for Nepali with locl feature (First indic fonts to have 'locl' feature implemented)

QT/Pango:

    Fixed most of the qt/harfbuzz indic rendering issues, In pango smaller improvement in Backspace processing for some indic characters.

4) Language Support

   i) Kashmiri

         a) select kashmiri keyboard layout from ibus-preferences (Kashmiri->inscript)

         b) Lohit Devanagari supports Kashmiri Characters recently added in Unicode 6.0

        People who made this possible http://pravin-s.blogspot.com/2011/04/fedora-15-support-kashmiri-language.html

   ii)  Sindhi

     a) select kashmiri keyboard layout from ibus-preferences (Sindhi->inscript)
     b) Lohit Devanagari supports Sindhi Characters

5) bharati-m17n

    bharati is an enhancement to input method based on Inscript layout and implements unique transformation rule of deleting on the fly the previous dependent vowel for Indic languages.

6) Packages Latest Version:

Liberation Fonts:
Added U+040D and U+0400 for Bulgarian language.

For Font Developers:

glyphtracer-1.3-1.fc15 (Glyphtracer takes an image of letters. It detects all letter forms and allows the user to tag them.  They are then vectorised and passed on to Fontforge for fine tuning.)

IBus Sayura 1.3.1 release. (The Sayura engine for IBus platform. It provides Sinhala input method.)

In this mostly writing indic related stuff but considering overall for i18n there are lots of things available in Fedora 15, so enjoy Fedora 15 with excellent and very useful i18n updates as well !!

Fedora 15 support Kashmiri language using Devanagari Script !!!!!!!!

This is really excellent feeling, it was 2007 when we first identified problems with Kashmiri Devanagari

1. Few key Matras (U+0956, U+0957) and corresponding vowels (U+0976, U+0977) were missing in Unicode (Now available from Unicode 6.0)
2. localedata was not available for Kashmiri Devanagari (http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6856)
3. Not much knowledge on how to deal with issues of One language multiple script in glibc locale (using lang@script )
4. No Fonts supporting Kashmiri  (Now its Lohit)
5. No Keymaps (ks-inscript.mim)

    Finally today i can say that all these issues are resolved and one can type kashmiri words without any problem.

    It took long time though but standardization is time consuming process :(. most of the time taken in proposal acceptance by Unicode.

    Thanks to all who supported this, specifically from , Department of Information Technology (Swarn Lata Madam, Director & HoD, TDIL Programme and Manoj Jain) also from community M.K. Raina, Raman Kaul and Rakesh Pandit. I really appreciate effort done by Mr. M.K Raina in Kashmiri language. We used those as a reference in standardization process.

    Kashmiri Devanagari community will be happy to know Fedora 15 support Kashmiri Devanagari, Now one can see kashmiri content, create Kashmiri content in Fedora. This all in standardize way with Unicode.

    Surely this will boost kashmiri localization activities.

84 Marathi Sahitya Sammelan (Literature Meet)

    Attended Marathi Sahitya Sammelan yesterday (27-12-2010) to meet and talk with people who create lots of content in Marathi Language in Thane. Following are the observations.

1) There is lots of content/books available in Marathi language, This covers almost  all the topics.  As compare to Last years Pune Sahitya Sammelan, In thane very few software/web development stall was available.

2) Digitization of these books is necessary activity, but due to cost of digitization
most of the books are still not digitized. I think OCR will be very helpful in this case.

3) Mostly people used InDesign on Windows for books, and they are still using 8-bit (non Unicode) fonts for it.

4) There was presentation about Unicode on Sunday and i missed it :(, While talking with some people i understood it covered most of the topic like how to enable Marathi on Windows, Linux. Enabling windows on Marathi shown with practical but Linux was not shown. Good thing is now users are aware of word Unicode but i think there is some misconceptions about it, people covers so many things under the name of Unicode ;)

5) I got one handout, it was about how to enable Marathi on windows and Ubuntu 9.10. for Ubuntu 9.10 it was about Installing Marathi Language support and selecting keyboard from Keyboard Preferences Tab (XIM)
In Fedora 14, Now there is no need to select even keyboard layout as well for your language, just select your language while log-in in GDM, ibus will auto detect your layout for your language, and by default it will enable all.

No one aware about this, i updated them about this and hopefully in there next release they will update notes about fedora as well.

6) I had a chat with Marathi Abhyas Kendra on recent development in Fedora i.e Updated in Lohit, Keyboards, Enhanced Inscript. One good point was they are Planning to host competition for Marathi font deigning i really appreciated that and agreed to give full support for same. Even today we do not have much active community around font development hopefully with such event people will be aware of font development process and start contributing.

Attended some talks on Marathi Libraries problems and possible improvements. One speaker (sorry forgotten name :() said agree that each person cant by iPAD/digital book reader but might be we can keep 5-10 ipad in each library and let people use them in library. this will be also a good start. He mentioned about Amazon.com that they not only sell soft copies but also courier the hard copies of book on demand as well.

The best thing i heard was he said don't give anything free to users, if we give it free user's does not value it well, always charge at least some/very little fee for same.

Attended one traditional dance event as well.

With respect to fedora
We are doing so much development for end-users/community, but sad to say very few are aware about it. Users are living in there own world. We should really start to do some event for people, who are developing contents in regional language, let them aware about to latest development happening in language technology. Try to bring them back from Windows proprietary world to open source collaborative world of Linux Fedora. I will be very happy to see  and contribute to such events. I talked with some people on how we can reach these users and answer was to media/new papers/press conference are the best way to let them know what are the available stuffs.

Looks like lohit is first open source indic font to support locale feature

I was just checking is there any other open source indic fonts, supporting locl opentype feature, but i did not found any other.

In Lohit now we have locl feature, so we have added locale specific shapes for Nepali Language.

One can test this by Typing "क्र" in gedit or in firefox, open this file with firefox ro gedit in ne_NP locale and see same with any other locale as well.

One can easily observe shape difference. There are some difference in uses of Devanagari in each language, will be good if we get some document about this  difference we will happy to implement it in lohit.

problem not able to open office format 2007 in office 2003

    This problem can always happen, i.e. we sent document in one format and person cant able to use/open it. So i suggest all please use open format whose specification are open and any operating system developer can easily add support for it.

     We can always use .pdf format it is open and any person receive it, no need to by Windows Operating System or MS Office just to open it. If we use .pdf it can be open on Linux, Mac and in Windows as well and even most of the smart phone now has ability to open pdf.

    Alternatively use openoffice (OpenSource office suite) it is available for Windwos, Linux and Mac as well. It uses open format like .odt. Its storage specification are open and any application can easily add support to open it without paying anyone any royalty.  Unlike .doc is proprietary format its specification are not open so no office suite can offer to open it, and with hack to .doc they cant give proper support for .doc.

    Communication standards must be always open without dependencies on particular company's format, Think for a language we speak, if we need to pay royalty to some company for each word of language we speak then what will happen?  .doc is Microsoft proprietary format.

    Might be it will difficult for people to switch to openoffice, but atleast everyone can use feature provided in openoffice, i.e. export to pdf. So you can open your document, export it to pdf and then send it via mail.  (http://download.openoffice.org/)


"www is open standards that why we can open any html page with any internet browser or any application on any OS. Anyone can implement it as it is open standard"
"At least we can start with  using pdf for communication"