Hi all,<br>
sorry for posting the same message again. I thought you might have missed it.<br>
I want to know lists' comments on this. Specifically, is it
acceptable to add some 2-3MB code of indic shaping engine (GNU GPL V2
or later), in GRASS code so that we can claim "GRASS supports 11 indian
scripts" ?<br>
Thanks<br><br>---------- Forwarded message ----------<br><span class="gmail_quote">From: <b class="gmail_sendername">SWAPNIL HAJARE</b> <<a href="mailto:dreamil1000a@yahoo.com">dreamil1000a@yahoo.com</a>><br>Date: Dec 1, 2005 4:17 PM
<br>Subject: Indic support in GRASS GIS with Indix2<br>To: <a href="mailto:indlinux-group@lists.sourceforge.net">indlinux-group@lists.sourceforge.net</a><br>Cc: <a href="mailto:dreamil@gmail.com">dreamil@gmail.com</a><br>
<br></span>Hi everybody,<br> greetings.<br><br>GRASS (<a href="http://www.grass.itc.it">http://www.grass.itc.it</a>) is a powerful desktop<br>GIS application. we have been working on it for some<br>time.The current version GRASS (
6.0.1) has support for<br>Unicode but doesn't support OpenType fonts. So things<br>like labels on maps could not be shown in Indian<br>scripts. As a workaround we used tryutype display-only<br>font setu-dev<br>(<a href="http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/janabhaaratii/page_gen.php?lang=en&body=/setu-doc/setu.html">
http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/janabhaaratii/page_gen.php?lang=en&body=/setu-doc/setu.html</a>).<br><br>After attending the Indix2<br>(<a href="http://ncst.ernet.in/projects/indix/">http://ncst.ernet.in/projects/indix/
</a>) developer<br>workshop at NCST, I started working on adding support<br>for Indic scripts in GRASS using Indix2 client<br>libraries (not sure if this is correct terminology -<br>but it can be compared in functionality with
<br>Pango/Qt).I have achieved some success in this as I<br>have managed to get display Unicode UTF-8 text on maps<br>using "d.text.freetype" utility of GRASS<br>(<a href="http://grass.itc.it/grass60/manuals/html60_user/d.text.freetype.html">
http://grass.itc.it/grass60/manuals/html60_user/d.text.freetype.html</a>).<br>What I have done basically is modified the<br>d.text.freetype code to check if the text to be<br>displayed falls under Indic scripts range and if it
<br>does, use Indix2 routines to convert the logical<br>sequence of characters to visual sequence of glyphs to<br>be displayed directly by X. Please see snapshot of the<br>same at<br><a href="http://203.199.16.202/grass_indix2_20051201.png">
http://203.199.16.202/grass_indix2_20051201.png</a><br>showing text in<br>Devanagari,gujarati,Gurumukhi,Bangla,Kannada,Tamil,Telugu,Malayalam<br>and Oriya. In the snapshot, the right side gedit<br>window shows the script which draws these labels in
<br>GRASS.<br><br>The fonts used in snapshot are Saral series fonts<br>developed by Indix2 team.Many thanks to Vinod Kumar<br>and Sandeep Rao of Indix2 team for their valuable<br>guidence.<br>There are lot many things to be cleaned up in the code
<br>and once it gets into some respectable form I am going<br>to submit this patch to the GRASS team.<br>Your comments/feedback awaited.<br>Thanks,<br><br>Swapnil K Hajare<br>Technical Coordinator,<br>janabhaaratii (<a href="http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in">
www.janabhaaratii.org.in</a>)<br>CDAC Mumbai (formerly NCST)<br>home: <a href="http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/portal/Members/swapnil/">http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/portal/Members/swapnil/</a><br>blog: <a href="http://dreamil.blogspot.com">
http://dreamil.blogspot.com</a><br><br><br><br>__________________________________________________________<br>Enjoy this Diwali with Y! India Click here <a href="http://in.promos.yahoo.com/fabmall/index.html">http://in.promos.yahoo.com/fabmall/index.html
</a><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Swapnil Hajare