[GRASS5] Fwd: Indic support in GRASS GIS with Indix2

[Swapnil Hajare]

HI all,
  my first post. I hope I am posting this is right list.
  this is for your comments. If it sounds ok, can some 2-3MB code of Indix2
(indic Shaping Engine) be included in grass code to claim something like
"GRASS GIS supports 11 Indian Scripts" ?

Bye

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: SWAPNIL HAJARE <dreamil1000a at yahoo.com>
Date: Dec 1, 2005 4:17 PM
Subject: Indic support in GRASS GIS with Indix2
To: indlinux-group at lists.sourceforge.net
Cc: dreamil at gmail.com

Hi everybody,
greetings.

GRASS (http://www.grass.itc.it) is a powerful desktop
GIS application. we have been working on it for some
time.The current version GRASS (6.0.1) has support for
Unicode but doesn't support OpenType fonts. So things
like labels on maps could not be shown in Indian
scripts. As a workaround we used tryutype display-only
font setu-dev
(
http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/janabhaaratii/page_gen.php?lang=en&body=/setu-doc/setu.html
).

After attending the Indix2
(http://ncst.ernet.in/projects/indix/) developer
workshop at NCST, I started working on adding support
for Indic scripts in GRASS using Indix2 client
libraries (not sure if this is correct terminology -
but it can be compared in functionality with
Pango/Qt).I have achieved some success in this as I
have managed to get display Unicode UTF-8 text on maps
using "d.text.freetype" utility of GRASS
(http://grass.itc.it/grass60/manuals/html60_user/d.text.freetype.html).
What I have done basically is modified the
d.text.freetype code to check if the text to be
displayed falls under Indic scripts range and if it
does, use Indix2 routines to convert the logical
sequence of characters to visual sequence of glyphs to
be displayed directly by X. Please see snapshot of the
same at
http://203.199.16.202/grass_indix2_20051201.png
showing text in
Devanagari,gujarati,Gurumukhi,Bangla,Kannada,Tamil,Telugu,Malayalam
and Oriya. In the snapshot, the right side gedit
window shows the script which draws these labels in
GRASS.

The fonts used in snapshot are Saral series fonts
developed by Indix2 team.Many thanks to Vinod Kumar
and Sandeep Rao of Indix2 team for their valuable
guidence.
There are lot many things to be cleaned up in the code
and once it gets into some respectable form I am going
to submit this patch to the GRASS team.
Your comments/feedback awaited.
Thanks,

Swapnil K Hajare
Technical Coordinator,
janabhaaratii (www.janabhaaratii.org.in)
CDAC Mumbai (formerly NCST)
home: http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/portal/Members/swapnil/
blog: http://dreamil.blogspot.com



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--
Swapnil Hajare
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