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		Malayalam International HOWTO
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	This HOWTO is just _STARTED_ I am planning to put all details
 about Malayalm computing in free Operating systems. If you can help me
in any way please contact me at : baiju@freeshell.org


Contents :-

	 1. Introduction
	 2. Input Methods
	 3. Font
	 4. Renderer
	 5. Locale 
	 6. Applications
	 7. Translations
	 8. Speach synthesizer
	 9. Speach Recognizer
	10. OCR
	11. Standards
	12. Miscelleneous
	13. Conclusion
	14. Appendix A
	15. Appendix B
	    

1. Introduction :-

	Malayalam is spoken by more than 35 million all around the world.
They are are named as 'Malayalees' and majority of them are from Kerala
(The God's Own Contry!) in India. The language has got a well established
script with 49 characters and it is a phonetic based script. The unicode
range for this characters are from U+0D00 to U+0DFF. 

(Can anyone write a nice *big* introduction? )


2, Input Methods :-

	The standared input method which is working properly is
inscript based. Malayalam inscript keyboard layout is standardised by 
Kerala government. If any hardware companies planning to make a
Malayalam keyboard, I think they will follow this standared. It is
very easy to impliment this layout in X Window System by using 
a XKB file and a secial Compose file for 'chillu' characters.
(In future, Compose file may not be required for this, read 
 standardization section below....wait)

All about this input method is described at :
http://malayalamlinux.sf.net/input-methods

A transliteration based input method will be available very soon.
It is written only for GTK+ appps. 

To impliment other keyboard layout like Modular (Typewriter)
it is necessary to hack on XIM or in GTK input method.

Applications like Yudit and Varamozhi supports transliteration
based input methods. (Can anyone please give me more details about it)

(If anyone is going to hack on XIM or IIMF for advanced malayalam input 
methods, please inform me; here is some simple codes:
http://malayalamlinux.sf.net/HOWTO/miniChinput-0.0.4.tar.bz2
Now start hacking on it!) 

Anyone interested to make a Table Input Method (TIM) for Malayalam?
Visit : http://wenju.sf.net 

I am planning to make this section the biggest in this this documenti,
yes only for few years ;-) 


3. Font :-

	TrueType is one of the widely used font format in X Window system.
TrueType font is a collection of TrueType vector outlines along with some 
standared tables. Now OpenType font is going to be more
popular in coming years. OpenType defines some advanced tables like 
GSUB and GPOS for a better support of international languages.
In unicode TTF fonts, basic characters of a language is positioned at 
alloted unicode range for that language. Private/Corporate use area can be 
use for positioning of other glyphs in a language.

	Malayalam unicode range is from U+0D00 to U+0D7F. Other glyphs of
Malayalam is posioned at Private/Corporate area in TTF font. In OTF font, 
other glyps are unencoded, and it can access by OpenType tables. 

GPLed TTF and OTF fonts are available at downloads section.
This font is created by Jeroen Hellingman using Metafont and later N.V.Shaji 
converted into TTF font and now OpenType tables support is added. There is 
total 136 glyphs . And it is released under GNU General Public License. 

(I will expand this section soon)


4. Renderer :-
	
	For BDF and TTF fonts a font renderer is required to display our glyphs
properly. Pango is a font renderer for GTK+ toolkit. 
Now a pango module for GTK+ is available. GTK+ toolkit is used by GNOME and lots of 
other applications, so Malayalam font will render properly in all GTK+ applications.


5. Locale :-

	For any language, locale database is necessary to make *COMPUTING* possible.
Locale contains informations about contry (calender,flag etc.) and language fetures
(sorting order, dates etc.). These all informations will be stored in unicode values.
Now allmost all tables are ready for Malayalam, even LC_COLLATE, it is the sorting order
table, ofcourse it requires to test.



6. Applications

	All GNOME 2.x applications will support Malayalam properly
(with proper rendering). 
 
 
7. Translations

	Wait............
	
	
8. Speach synthesizer

	No Idea ;)

	
9. Speach Recognizer
	
	No Idea ;)
	

10. OCR
	
	No Idea ;)


11. Standards

	Recently Ministry of IT (Govt. of India) proposed some changes in Malayalam unicode
character set, they suggested to include 'chillus' as basic basic building
blocks. Now 'chillus' are represented by three unicode characters.
	
	
12. Miscelleneous

	Lots of miscelleneous things are there....
...wait.


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