Re: [WMASTERS] Re: Old Orthography, response to Kalyan

[Leong Kok Yong <kokyong@irdu.nus.sg>]

In fact, i've seen a Tamil Unicode UTF-8 module for Alis Tango browser and
creator (though it's not officially released yet).
http://www.alis.com/

You can view a few Tamil encodings, including 7-bit Mylai, TamilNet,
Murasu and Unicode UTF8. Keyboard input in all of these encodings are also
supported! But i'm not sure where they pick up the keyboard layout from?!
But the problem is all these works within the Tango browser and creator
environment only.

So Tamil Unicode computing is already here! But not so widespread yet..



On Tue, 16 Sep 1997, Muthu Nedumaran (Ezil) wrote:

> Dear Kalyan,
> 
> At 12:15 PM 9/16/97 +0000, Dr.K. Kalyanasundaram wrote:
> 
> .... snipped ....
> 
> >Instead of waiting for Microsoft or Apple to take the lead, why cannot
> >we launch ourselves a unicode conformant font, software containing
> >English, Tamil and few others ) and have some field testing
> >concurrently?
> >Can we not adopt the same approach as that of Microsoft and Apple but
> >tailored to Tamil? What are the technical hurdles if any?
> >
> 
> It *is* possible.  You may have seen the Unicode font with Tamil that
> I demonstrated at the Singapore conference.  Problem is there are no 
> (not that I know of) high-level (i.e. user friendly) tools that'll 
> help up do that today.  We need to fiddle a little with some low level
> structures to realise a Tamil font with a working glyph substitution 
> table.
> 
> I'm sure the tool vedors are working on having this implemented in
> future revisions - some of them have openly stated that they are.
> 
> However, we need to also note that Unicode based *text* has to be 
> saved in double-bytes.  Not all shrink-wrapped applications today
> do that.  If we want to see Tamil on Unicode encoding, we must 
> have/use a Unicode enabled application - which are not that many 
> or common today.
> 
> anbudan,
> 
> ~ MUTHU
> 
> 
> 
> 
>