[Oriya-group] More on open-source Oriya rendering issues

[Gora Mohanty]

Hello,
  To remind people of the issues, there were
significant problems in the rendering of Oriya text
under open-source platforms. In particular, we were
concerned with three rendering engines: Pango/GTK used
by GNOME, QT used by KDE, and ICU used by OpenOffice.

  Over the past week, I started looking into issues of
Oriya rendering in the latest versions of ICU, 3.2 and
3.4beta. Most of the earlier problems had been fixed,
and I have solved the few remaining ones. There is
still quite a bit of work to be done in porting the
changes back to ICU 2.6 that is used by the current
version of OpenOffice (1.9x) and that will also be
used for the 2.0 series. OpenOffice will move to ICU
3.4 only in version 2.01, probably 3-4 months from
now, so that it would still be of use to quickly
fix ICU 2.6. I am now in a position to describe how
to attack this problem, and it can be narrowed down
to a few hundred lines of C code. Necessary
documentation can also be made available. Finally,
we need someone to coordinate the Oriya OpenOffice
program. Please contact me if you are interested in
any of this.

  As of Pango 1.2, used in the next version of GNOME,
2.12, the rendering of Indic scripts is adapted
directly from the ICU code, so very similar fixes
were applied to it to bring the Oriya rendering to
100%, at least as far as our comprehensive list of
Oriya conjuncts goes. These patches have been
submitted to the Pango team, and should be included
in GNOME 2.12.

  The remaining renderer is QT, and I am currently
looking at QT 4, which will be used in KDE 4.0. To
my knowledge, there are only five improperly formed
conjuncts here, so that hopefully fixing this should
not take too long.

  So, maybe now is the time to think of reviving our
long-dormant Oriya localization program? Anyone
interested?

Regards,
Gora


		
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