Re: [Freebangfont-devel] seeking help regarding bangla fonts in linux

[Deepayan Sarkar]

Hi,

to reiterate what Sayamindu said, you should probably try to figure out what 
exactly it is that you want to do before actually doing anything. As I see 
it, there can be two approaches to writing software (leaving aside commercial 
motives) -- the first is to just have fun and learn new things, and the 
second (which is not necessarily incompatible with the first) is to do it in 
such a way that it might be useful to someone other than yourself. There is 
nothing wrong with either way, but you definitely should not confuse the two.

I say this because from the description of your project, this sounds like the 
first approach, whereas your motivations (GNU/FSF and helping other students 
etc) seem more like the second.

If the first approach is what you want, that is perfectly OK. Ask us what you 
want to know, we will try to answer as best we can. If you hope to do more 
(maybe not today, but someday), read on.

Why will your project not help others ? Because you are doing work that has 
already been done and is widely used. KDE (which is written in Qt) has 
several editors that support Unicode (which covers Bengali, Hindi, English 
and a lot more). They don't support opentype fonts (required to properly 
display conjuncts etc) yet, but that support is expected in the next release 
of Qt. Gtk/Gnome, on the other hand already has fairly good opentype support 
through pango, and I bet that the gedit program that comes with RH 8 will 
properly display bengali and hindi as soon as you install the appropriate 
fonts. It's not very obvious how to do input, but it's possible. And there 
are lots of other examples (Lekho, Yudit, etc).

The problem of course is how to know what has been done and what hasn't. This 
in my experience is one of the most difficult things in the Free Software 
world. But it's not impossible. If there's something you think you would like 
to do, search on the net about it, read the mailing lists, maybe ask us to 
see what we know about it.

Anyway, I hope all that helps. Feel free to ask more questions.

Deepayan

On Thursday 03 April 2003 03:56 am, saikat sengupta wrote:
>    We are students of Computer science and engineering(3rd
> year),Kolkata.Very recently we came across linux8.0(red hat) and the
> associated free software foundations.We are very moved by the concept and
> trying to do something of our own.So we want to create a mutlilingual
> editor (supporting Bengali,Hindi and English fonts) for the students
> helping them in differnt ways. We have created an editor in Qt Designer and
> now are trying  to make that multilingual using Unicode format.We came to
> know about your works in the field of "bangla fonts" and thought that we
> might get appropriate help from you.Since we have been introduced to this
> very recently just by sheer interest,it will be very helpful to us if you
> can render your help or  any suggestions to us.If it is possible for you to
> spend some time from your tight schedule for us please let us know so that
> we could ask you about our specific problems.Our mail I.D.'s are:
> address@hidden     and      address@hidden          
>                                          yours sincerely, Saikat Sengupta
>        Arnash Gupta.
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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