Re: Alternatives to Adobe CS2 [Was: Unicode Support in Adobe CS2]

From: Edward H. Trager (ehtrager@umich.edu)
Date: Fri May 06 2005 - 14:25:07 CDT

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    On Wednesday 2005.05.04 11:39:27 -0400, Edward H. Trager wrote:
    >
    > Hi, Mustafa,
    >
    > In as much as Adobe does not currently support Indic script layout properly,
    > you might want to investigate whether or not one of the following Open Source products
    > can meet your needs:
    >
    > 1) Inkscape
    >
    > http://www.inkscape.org
    >
    > Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator,
    > Freehand, and CorelDraw. It uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
    > format, so illustrations done in Inkscape should be exportable to these other
    > programs.
    >
    > Inkscape uses the Pango layout engine which supports the layout of Indic and
    > Indic-derived scripts. The following chart shows which complex text layout
    > scripts were supported in Pango 1.8 as of December, 2004:
    >
    > http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/iuc27/html/img24.html
    >
    > A bug I filed with the Inkscape developers in December regarding
    > positioning of over-the-consonant and under-the-consonant
    > vowels and tone marks for Thai (which would most likely also affect other Indic
    > scripts like Devanagari and Bengali) was reported as fixed and closed on March 10, 2005.
    > I have not yet personally had a chance to verify the reported fix.
    >
    > Inkscape is available for Linux and Windows. I believe some people are working
    > on a port for Mac OS X.

    UPDATE RE. INKSCAPE: The bug fixes for Indic (and Semitic RTL) scripts support are currently
    available in the development versions in the CVS repository, not in the stable release. However,
    anyone can obtain Daily builds of the development version
    for Windows and Linux at http://www.inkscape.org/download.php.

    Earlier today I verified that the program really works with a good selection of complex text
    layout scripts Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hebrew, Kannada, and Thai (as well as also testing some
    non-complex scripts). You can see my results (and download the test SVG file) at
    http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/inkscape/

       - Ed Trager
         Kellogg Eye Center
         University of Michigan
         Ann Arbor

     

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