haccme@milton.u.washington.edu (Thomas Ridgeway) (04/30/91)
A previous article in soc.culture.indian (no reference,
I didn't see it) apparently mentioned that there exists a Tamil
font for TeX. That is true. Provided below are some details.
The font, Washington Tamil, was developed at, and is available
from, the Humanities and Arts Computing Center of the University
of Washington. It is also available in the `official' UnixTeX
distribution.
HOW TO GET IT:
The UnixTeX distribution is fairly well known; it may be ordered from
North West Computing Support Center, DR-10
University of Washington
Seattle WA 98195 USA
phone: (206)-543-6259
email: elisabet@max.u.washington.edu
UnixTeX is NOT subsidized by Washington taxpayers; there is a
distribution fee, inquire for details. UnixTeX is a large
package; the Tamil font is a very tiny part of it.
In the UnixTeX tape, the files are located in:
TeX3.14/MFcontrib/metafonts/washington/tamil
For those with access to anonymous ftp, the files may be obtained from
blackbox.hacc.washington.edu
in directory pub/wntml
WHAT WILL YOU GET? A font which its author considers to be an
unfinished product much in need of refinement. It MAY, however,
be better than any other Tamil font which is available to you.
You would have to be the judge of that. The ftp site (but NOT the
UnixTeX tape) includes some software to assist in mapping from one
particular transcription system to a TeX'able transcription.
There is nothing system-specific about the tamil font; it may be
used on any system running a standard TeX.
Enclosed is an extract of the readme.doc file from the ftp site:
****************************************************************
** Brief notes on the use of the wntml Tamil-in-METAFONT font **
Wntml was developed for a bilingual dictionary project which
has now been in development for some six years. The project
was begun on PCs using a romanized transcription with no
attempts to represent Tamil script interactively. Existing
facilities for producing Tamil output are based entirely on this
Latin-script transcription of Tamil.
Someone at liberty to begin anew, could use a much cleaner solution.
The transcription scheme we are using is illustrated by the following chart.
To view this chart in a meaningful way, run
tamilize readme.doc readme.tex
then TeX and print the results. (You will need to have
run METAFONT on wntml first, of course. And have installed
TeX etc. etc.)
a aa i ii u uu e ee o oo ai au
ka kaa ki kii ku kuu ke kee ko koo kai kau
nga ngaa ngi ngii ngu nguu nge ngee ngo ngoo ngai ngau
[ remainder of chart deleted ]
Tamilize converts the transcribed tamil (using the tilde
character as a delimiter for strings in Tamil script ---
text is assumed in Roman until the first tilde; the vertical
bar character is used to delimit strings which should be
output as romanized Tamil using the usual dots-under-letters
and other customary diacritics for Indic) into a series of
TeX macros, each of which prints a single
Tamil grapheme. Tamil graphemes generally correspond to
syllables, so essentially Tamilize is scanning its input
for syllables and invoking a predetermined macro for
each syllable.
[ further details omitted ]
******************** [ end of extract ] **********************
Cheerio,
Tom
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Thomas Ridgeway, Director,
Humanities and Arts Computing Center/NorthWest Computing Support Center
35 Thomson Hall, University of Washington, DR-10
Seattle, WA 98195 phone: (206)-543-4218
Internet: ridgeway@blackbox.hacc.washington.edu
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