[Wikimediaindia-l] (OT) On the importance of Unicode

[Gautam John]

Thank you, once again, Anivar.

> Rendering Engines like Pango evolved through more than 10 years of
> patching & correction by language communities. It work Pretty well in
> most of the indic languages.

That's a relief!

> Now For latin script wiki's there is PDF download option & Pediapress
> to print them directly
> In short Rendering is a major roadblock in reaching wikipedia to
> masses. The projects like santhosh's effort  are very important to
> fill this gap.

Indeed and I now see how important it is to be able to abstract away
OS dependency on this as well.

> This is the only viable option as of now. Most of the languages have
> around 10-20 popular fonts . Creating Mapping tables for them is
> anyway a big task .

Wow! That is impressive - I was looking at it through a publishing
lens - a print publishing lens, and from what little I know, they use
hundreds of fonts over the years and as important as online is, there
is also this mass of legacy content locked up away and that will never
see the light of the internet unless such mapping tables are created.

> There is no other free alternative .  BTW Document Conversion is a big
> business and many corporates are working on this area to provide
> solutions for companies & governments

Really? Would you be able to point me to any products or services that
exists around this, please?

> In my opinion, Efforts on this will be waste of time & money .I dont
> believe in miracles with CDAC.

*sigh*

> CDACMumbai have a history of GPL Licensing one font series as a part
> of their indix project  , Raghu Series, by Late. Prof. R.K.Joshi,
> Famous Calligrapher and Researcher in Type faces.

I did not know this - thanks for pointing me to it.

> Yes. And Problems & instability  in unicode encoding also affects this

Thanks much Anivar. I really appreciate the answers and have learned much.

Best,

Gautam
________
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