Fw: Tamil Unicode support on latest Mac OS Tiger /10.4 release

[Muthu Nedumaran]

Dear Friends,

For your information please.

~ MUTHU

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kalyanasundaram" <kalya...@yahoo.com>
To: <pmad...@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 11:06 PM
Subject: [pmadurai] Tamil Unicode support on latest Mac OS Tiger /10.4
release


> Dear Friends:
>
> Recently I got and installed the latest Mac OS release
> 10.4 (aka Tiger) on my G4 powermac - one that provides OS
> level support for Tamil Unicode. At last poor hardcore Mac
> addicts like myself and Dr. N. Kannan be happy to see direct
> OS level support for Tamil Unicode.
>
> Strangely Apple has not widely publicized this key development.
> Enabling of Tamil support appears in small lines in the
> Mac OS Tiger release page if you care to read all the small
> letters in the right side boxes. (Of course if you know Muthu,
> you don't need to depend on these finer details to catch
> up ;-)) )
>
> Obviously I have been trying out various application softwares
> on Tiger Mac OS to see how many of these current versions
> do support Tamil unicode-based texts. In case you are curious
> on the results so far:
>
> Unicode Tamil font:
> For those who are not aware, Muthu Nedumaran has been
> primarily responsible to enable Tamil Unicode on the latest
> Mac OS release. His font "Inaimathi" and his Murasu Anjal
> Text Editor now come as part of the Mac OS Tiger kit ;-)
> Anjal text editor allows text input as per romanized or
> Tamilnet 99 keyboard.
>
> It turns out very easy to design your own keyboard editor
> for Tamil Unicode Text input in Mac OS 10.4/Tiger. I have
> made my own "mylai" keyboard editor for text input as per
> Mylai keyboard layout/Mylai Tamil font with some minor changes.
> I have also made a Tamil Typewriter keyboard for text input
> as per Tamil typewriter for fun.
>
> Interestingly nearly all Unicode Tamil fonts of Windows platform
> can be used as such in Mac OS Tiger, if you are content to
> see linear mode display. Other than Inaimathi font that comes
> with Apple OS 10.4, there are no other Unicode font currently
> available to display Tamil characters correctly. One needs
> to repack Open True Type fonts for use with ATSUI font rendering
> engine of Mac.
>
> on the browser:
> only Safari browser of Mac OS displays Tamil text correctly.
> Browsers like Netscape 7.2, Mozilla FireFox 5.0, IE 5.2,
> German iCab 2.9.8 display Tamil Unicode text in linear mode
> (without using the GSub table)
>
> With Safari browser, one can do Google search directly in
> Tamil words. It works fine. Other browsers also, if you are
> content with linear mode display of Tamil unicode texts.
>
> I tried to use recent Project Madurai etext search engine
> in Unicode put up by Dr. Vasu. No problems. You can do search
> and retrieve search results in Mac OS 10.4
>
> Text Editor:
> Only TextEdit and iPage Editor of Apple alone display
> Unicode Tamil texts correctly. BBEdit shows Tamil text
> only in linear form
>
> One elegant feature of Mac OS 10.4 is the possibility to
> display Tamil Unicode texts in ORNL format, using the
> options within the FontTools utility. Saved text is as
> per standard unicode encoding but one can choose to display
> lai/Nai/nai/Raa/Lai/... as per current or old style forms.
> Quite impressive and cool plus on the Mac platform.
>
> Microsoft Office 2004 (designed for Mac OS X)
> here MS Word and Excel display Tamil text only in
> linear form.
>
> On the Excel, I typed few Tamil words in Unicode and tried
> sorting. Interestingly the sorting appears to work fine.
>
> A request to MichKa: is there any likelihood for MS to come
> up with an update to Office 2004 that uses effectivley the
> ATSUI font rendering engine of Mac OS for text display in
> the near future?
>
> If others have additional experiences/information to share,
> please let me know.
>
> anbudan
> Kalyan
>
>

[Muthu Nedumaran]