On Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:45:17 +0530
Ruvan Weerasinghe wrote:

> One of the annoying problems to which we keep returning and for
> which we have no answer or even a hope of an answer for the near
> future is complex script support for professional publishing
> software.
>
> Was wondering if we'd have enough muscle (we need to get India to
> lead this!) to press folks like Adobe, Quark (even Scribus?) to
> move faster in this matter. It is almost becoming a matter of
> credibility of our advocacy of UNICODE!

While I cannot make a statement on this but what I feel is , at least
for propreitary software to support it, they need motivation of
market, which I feel lacks in the Indian context, with large mass of
lowend DTP publishers using pirated copies of software. And the other
segment of larger users (publishing houses, newspapers etc) have
either their custom solutions or those developed by Multilingual
software vendors like CDAC, Akruti etc..

There have been ongoing efforts to have Scribus support Indic
scripts, the timeline as to when it happens is not clear.. one
technical reason stated being that way Scribus is designed, its
rather difficult to simply use ICU / Pango etc. A common script
renderer - Harfbuzz
(http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz) which is aimed to
be used in FOSS software.

I am cc'ing to couple of people who have be active Scribus front,
they could update better (since recently a Scribus developer was
invited to an event in Delhi where idea was to have interaction on
getting Indic support in Scribus). Will fwd their reponse to the list
since they may not be on it.

> The alternative is to follow the Tamil Nadu TUNE effort and press
> for non-complex representations of our scripts in UNICODE - another
> impossibility (as may appear after the TUNE-UNICODE discussions
> earlier this year).
>
> Any other ideas? Support Microsoft Publisher? ;-)

Inkscape is another tool which can be used for DTP (though is
intended purpose is SVG graphics ),
one experience of trying it -
http://santhoshtr.livejournal.com/#entry_9969

Another idea could be (I would be biased towards FOSS), even tweaking
OpenOffice to do DTP, but would perhaps first need clear marking of
what features used in a DTP that OpenOffice lacks.

Regards,
Karunakar

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