[dev-context] Re: kannadaTeX

[Mojca Miklavec]

Hans Hagen Outside wrote:
> shiva shankar shankar wrote:
> 
>> Dear sir,
>>
>>         We have kannadaTeX/LaTeX for kannada language. Please tell me 
>> how to enable the kannada language in conTeX.
>>
>> For this language we have for different shapes of fonts "regular", 
>> "slant", "bold"  and "bold and slant". We have hyphenation patterns 
>> for kannada language.
>>
>> How can i make kannada as default in ConTeX and it should also use 
>> kannada hyphenation patterns.

 > take a look at the lang-*.tex files (e.g. lang-ger.tex)

I'm affraid it's "a bit" more complex than writing a lang-*.tex file.

See
- http://sarovar.org/project/showfiles.php?group_id=66
- www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0C80.pdf
- http://varamozhi.sourceforge.net/iscii91.pdf

A (probably incomplete) list of things to do:

1. % core-con.tex
\defineconversionvector{kannadanumerals} {"0CE6}
\defineconversion[kannadanumerals] [\conversionnumber{kannadanumerals}]

2. support for transliteration

3. unic-012.tex, enco-uc.tex, enco-knd.tex, is support for iscii needed 
as well?

3.a) How should the letters be named? \kannadakha or \kndkha?

4. support for vowels (a kind of accents) (???), also when the 
composition comes from unicode (I don't even know if this is supported 
in latin alphabets)

5. enable the fonts (a topic that I don't understand anyway, perhaps 
something for Adam)

6. lang-ind.tex
- label names
- automatically switching to kannada numbers
- perhaps also autonmatic switching to the proper fonts/encoding?

7. ... ?

I can help at the point 3 if needed.

> - what fonts are used?

I took a look at the .mf files in the link above. I hardly know anything 
about metafont, but I guess that the source is "clean" enough (no pens, 
only fills) to make Type 1 fonts out of the sources with Metatype1.

Mojca