[OSM-dev] Google Summer of Code

[Jon Burgess]

On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 11:50 -0700, Mikel Maron wrote:
> 
> > From: Tom Hughes <tom at compton.nu>
> > 
> > In message
> <8990327d0804230928p7739f912o568fdf24020896ad at mail.gmail.com>
> >          "Arindam Ghosh" <makghosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 3:22 PM, Gora Mohanty <gora at sarai.net>
> wrote:
> > > >  I work on internationalisation, and localisation issues,
> especially
> > > >  as these pertain to Indian languages, and would be glad to help
> out
> > > >  on this project. I hope that there is no need for me to become
> an
> > > >  official mentor, as I cannot always guarantee having time
> available
> > > >  when needed.
> > > 
> > > That's great...:) Can you please provide some pointers regarding
> > > implementation of lingatures and vowel positioning of Indic
> scripts. I
> > > would like to study how much of these would be required pertaining
> to
> > > project.
> > 
> > I wouldn't have thought you should have to worry about that much
> > really - if you've got valid UTF and you use an appropriate text
> > rendering library then that sort of stuff should sort itself out.
> 
> Rendering Indic characters into glyphs is not so straight forward --
> the fonts require a lookup table or state machine to account for all
> the variations in character combination.
> 
> For the web site, yes I think we can rely on the browser for this,
> with testing of course. For other pieces of the ecosystem, it will
> need more inquiry, if there's time this summer. I am aware that
> IndicTrans has been working on an open source solution, but not sure
> how much work it will be to integrate.

Mapnik currently uses the ICU library which I believe implements some of
this already: http://www.icu-project.org/ 

The main issue with multilingual rendering on the Mapnik layer is that
the code only supports using a single font for all the text on the map.
Currently we use the DejaVu fonts which have a reasonable coverage but
not enough for everyone to be happy. http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/ 

	Jon