[GRASS5] [bug #3189] (grass) lack of support for Unicode and Opentype font based indian language rendering in GUI

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this bug's URL: http://intevation.de/rt/webrt?serial_num=3189
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Subject: lack of support for Unicode and Opentype font based indian language rendering in GUI

Platform: GNU/Linux/i386
grass obtained from: Trento Italy site
grass binary for platform: Compiled from Sources
GRASS Version: 6.0.0

Swapnil Hajare : janabhaaratii team (www.janabhaaratii.org.in)
The current version of GRASS (6.0.0) has full internationalization and localization support for indian scripts covered by Unicode.But this support is available in the form of output of command line operations.What is required now is to extend this support to GUI i.e. either tcltkgrass or GUI based on some other library like GTK+2.0 . For rendering Indian Language text in Unicode, there are rendering engines available like Pango and QT, which can be used by libraries like GTK and QT to render the text properly. The current GUI of GRASS developed in tcltk doesn't render Indic text written in Unicode. Although it shows the characters in non-rendered font because of freetype library, that is not sufficient. What is needed, therefore is to design a GUI in some library which supports Indic script rendering (most obvious is GTK) so that GRASS can be localized in indian languages in real sense.
  I would like to bring to your notice some efforts done at janabhaaratii. We have a live CD based on Knoppix 3.6 which has grass54 installed on it.This is accompanied by some vector maps of Maharashtra state and a MySQL database connected to one of the vector with query and update options. All this is in English so far because of lack of support in tcltk. We also have a labelled map with labels in Marathi (one of the major language in India using Devanagari script U+0900-U+097F) where we have converted the labels from Unicode to a ASCII based truetype font and dislpayed it on monitor.While this is a quick and dirty solution, we believe that the GRASS community should help  solving this difficulty faced by people from "Complex Text Layout" category and thus enable more and more people from this country which has merely 5% of population communicating in English.


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