u31b3hs@cip-s01.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt) (12/05/90)
Hello world!
This is probably the last posting before I post sources of our first
release on the net. For people, who didn't read my last postings, I
will summary our project in a few words: We are a group of students
developing an open text formatter system, which allows to write in
Hindi. At first, we did a lot of theoretical work about how input
should be made. We tested several concepts with roff4 and a printer
download font. It should be possible to adapt all to other indian
languages. Everything is very modular. I will not describe more
details, because you can read all details when I post it. The current
version works on plain vanilla MINIX PC 1.5.10.
I first want to report what our group has done and say then what we
still have to do.
I finished writing mroff, a roff which uses the Hershey fonts including
a preview for Hercules graphics cards and printer drivers for epson 8
and 24 pin dot matrix printers. There is a -man and a -ms like macro
library and a mprep, which submits spell checking using the MINIX
dictionaries. I nearly finished one Hindi font, there are only a few
characters and the digits missing at the moment. Our group defined
transliterations for the complete Hindi alphabet including dashes and
dots. These transliterations are processable by a mroff preprocessor,
which is nearly finished (because of the incomplete font). This
preprocessor generates mroff input with correct escape sequences for
writing e.g. an e or an u over its left neighbour byself. All programs
reached version 1.0 or higher, which means that they should be stable.
There are manuals and documents describing the whole project and
explaining the use of each program.
In a week or two, I should have finished the font and the preprocessor,
but I can take more time, if I am very busy. Our group must proovread
the documents and manuals. A friend of mine makes a beta test of mroff
at the moment. As you can see, all theoretical work has done, and there
are only little things left. Perhaps, I port all sources to Sun3/Sun4
workstations for testing and getting more portability.
Our group want to thank everyone who helped with suggestions and all
people who replied to previous postings. I got so many email, that I
can not reply each writer :-(. I will post this announcement in
soc.culture.indian and comp.os.minix. If everything is finished,
debugged(?), proovread, compressed and uudecoded, I will post it in
comp.os.minix and post a hint in soc.culture.indian. I read both groups
daily. If someone is not happy about the way to post the sources,
please send email. I am trying to get an own directory on our local ftp
site for opening an archive with sources from this material and other
MINIX stuff I wrote.
Angelica R. Gupta - Monika Pandey - Michael Haardt
Send email to: u31b3hs%cip-s01.informatik.rwth-aachen.de@unido.bitnet
Do not use the return adress in the header, please.
Snail mail: Michael Haardt, Auf der Hoern 40, 5100 Aachen, Germany
------------------------------- Namaskaar -----------------------------------