RE: Tamil and Unicode

From: Arash Zeini (ar.zeini@uni-koeln.de)
Date: Sat Jun 05 1999 - 17:46:15 EDT


Thank you very much for the answers.
So if I understand it right, there is nothing I can really do right now,
beside waiting, if I don't want to go the way of other plug-ins...
Important for us is to publish our texts on the WWW where everybody can
have access to them via IE5 or more ...

Thanks a lot again,
Arash

>
>Windows 2000 will support correct glyph shaping of several complex scripts,
>including Tamil, and will ship with a Tamil font. It isn't a great font,
>because it's been optimized for legibility in menus and dialogs, not for
>high quality desktop publishing. The plaintext display APIs (ExtTextOut,
>DrawText, GetTextExtent*, etc) have been extended to support complex script
>and provide one level of font fallback. This means if the glyphs required
>for a particular script aren't in the currently selected font, a glyph from
>a fall back font for that script will be used if available.
>
>With this support you can create, display, edit, and print plaintext
>documents encoded in Unicode or UTF-8 containing Tamil and other scripts,
>using notepad, for example. There will also be a version of Office 2000 that
>supports Tamil. I don't know the release date but it should be available
>about the time Windows 2000 ships.
>
>There is also a new API called Uniscribe that provides display and editing
>features for formatted text containing complex scripts. For details, see
>http://www.microsoft.com/msj/1198/multilang/multilangtop.htm
>
>
>F. Avery Bishop
>Program Manager, International Evangelism
>averyb@microsoft.com
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Jeroen Hellingman [mailto:jehe@kabelfoon.nl]
>Sent: Friday, June 04, 1999 10:14 AM
>To: Unicode List
>Subject: Re: Tamil and Unicode
>
>
>The question pops up once in a while. You can use the Unicode characters
>for Tamil in your XML documents, but you will need software that is capable
>of
>rendering Tamil correctly, that is, using the correct ligatures of consonant
>and vowels,
>etc., if you want to be able to read it. The encoding would be the same as
>for other
>Unicode files. Unfortunately, very few software packages support Tamil
>as of now. One product that does support Tamil in Unicode is Unitype Global
>Writer, but
>unfortunately, you still have to select a Tamil font manually when it
>encounters
>a Tamil character, as it won't do it automatically. I consider this a big
>shortcoming, as
>I need to switch scripts extremely often. (I evaluated it for dictionary
>making, in which the
>scripts switch several times for each headword.).
>
>Jeroen
>
>
>



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