[Padma] Indic font converters

[Gora Mohanty]

Hi,
  I have been trying to find time to initiate this discussion for a
while now, though I have had informal conversations with Surekha and
Raghavan before. The success of Padma and the Firefox Indic have
spurred me to make time to do this. I have to rush off shortly, but I
thought that it would be useful to initiate a discussion.
  I would like to take a unified approach to Indic keymaps, and font
conversions, as they both address the same problem, one of translating
from a given input character sequence to a corresponding output
character sequence. Of course, there are complications like maximal
length matching, reordering, etc., and at least a couple of different
valid approaches to the problem. I have a set of Perl scripts that
handle all this, and have used them to make converters for specific
Oriya fonts, and for a Hindi to Urdu transliterator.
  I propose that we start sharing all the work that has gone into
individual converters. Irrespective of the particular software
used, we should at least be able to agree on a common format (say, an
XML DTD) for the conversion table. One can then translate this to the
desired format for a particular application.
  I have more ambitions after this modest first step, but first, please
let me know if you want to work together on this. I will then prepare a
short writeup with my thoughts on this, and you guys can also share
your viewpoints.

Regards,
Gora


		
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