[IAEP] Computer as a tool

[K. K. Subramaniam]

On Thursday 13 Aug 2009 10:52:05 am Edward Cherlin wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 8:21 PM, K. K. Subramaniam<subbukk at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Baraha/Nudi were designed for office documents, not school work.
> > Transition to Unicode/UTF-8 for text is not yet complete.
>
> We may be able to help. Tell us more. For example, how much secular
> and religious Kannada literature is available in Unicode?
I am not sure because both Unicode (e.g. http://kn.wikipedia.org) and 
Baraha/Nudi (e.g. online dictionary at http://kannadakasturi.com) are in use 
today. Teachers are also Government employees and use Nudi for departmental 
communications. Recent versions of Nudi are Unicode friendly and some versions 
run in Wine so old documents can be exported in UTF-8. The quality of GTK and 
Qt rendering engines have improved to a level where Linux/UTF-8 can be used 
for regular school work. We offer all options to the teachers and let them make 
their choices.

> > Indic truetype fonts don't blend well with text mixing English and Math
> > symbols. Kannada scripts involve double subscripts giving them a larger
> > average height. Indic text will appear visually smaller in mixed context.
> > You will see this effect in mailing lists like Indlinux-group.
> > Fontography is yet to catch up with Typography.
>
> All right, let's have a look. Here is some Kannada text about math in
> Unicode encoding, from Wikipedia. I'm looking at it in a Free Truetype
> font that comes with Ubuntu, in the ttf-kannada-fonts package. We have
> Kedage, Lohit, and Malige fonts.
Attached picture shows the rendering in different fonts (FreeSans falls back to 
proprietary font). I had to increase my default font from 8pt to 9pt for a 
legible screenshot. Still the double subscript in 2nd glyph in first line in 
Kedage is barely readable. Only Lohit rendered Za correctly.

Subbu
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: kn-rendering.png
Type: image/png
Size: 184551 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/attachments/20090813/f6f0b65f/attachment-0001.png