Details Ticket 3189


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Serial Number 3189
Subject lack of support for Unicode and Opentype font based indian language rendering in GUI
Area wish6
Queue grass
Requestors janabhaaratii@ncst.ernet.in
Owner mneteler
Status open
Last User Contact Thu Jan 12 15:36:56 2006 (3 yr ago)
Current Priority 25
Final Priority 70
Due No date assigned
Last Action Thu Jan 12 15:36:56 2006 (3 yr ago)
Created Thu Apr 28 07:36:37 2005 (3 yr ago)

Transaction History Ticket 3189


Thu, Apr 28 2005 07:36:37    Request created by guest  
Subject: lack of support for Unicode and Opentype font based indian language
rendering in GUI

Platform: GNU/Linux/i386
grass obtained from: Trento Italy site
grass binary for platform: Compiled from Sources
GRASS Version: 6.0.0

Swapnil Hajare : janabhaaratii team (www.janabhaaratii.org.in)
The current version of GRASS (6.0.0) has full internationalization and localization
support for indian scripts covered by Unicode.But this support is available in
the form of output of command line operations.What is required now is to extend
this support to GUI i.e. either tcltkgrass or GUI based on some other library
like GTK+2.0 . For rendering Indian Language text in Unicode, there are rendering
engines available like Pango and QT, which can be used by libraries like GTK
and QT to render the text properly. The current GUI of GRASS developed in tcltk
doesn't render Indic text written in Unicode. Although it shows the characters
in non-rendered font because of freetype library, that is not sufficient. What
is needed, therefore is to design a GUI in some library which supports Indic
script rendering (most obvious is GTK) so that GRASS can be localized in indian
languages in real sense.
  I would like to bring to your notice some efforts done at janabhaaratii. We
have a live CD based on Knoppix 3.6 which has grass54 installed on it.This is
accompanied by some vector maps of Maharashtra state and a MySQL database connected
to one of the vector with query and update options. All this is in English so
far because of lack of support in tcltk. We also have a labelled map with labels
in Marathi (one of the major language in India using Devanagari script U+0900-U+097F)
where we have converted the labels from Unicode to a ASCII based truetype font
and dislpayed it on monitor.While this is a quick and dirty solution, we believe
that the GRASS community should help  solving this difficulty faced by people
from "Complex Text Layout" category and thus enable more and more people from
this country which has merely 5% of population communicating in English.
Wed, May 25 2005 16:00:21    Area changed to wish6 by bernhard  
Wed, May 25 2005 16:00:29    Priority changed to 25 by bernhard  
Wed, May 25 2005 16:02:02    Mail sent by bernhard  
Thanks for your suggestion and the entry in the tracker 
(I classified it as wish now).

As always with GRASS, we would like to add a lot, but are lacking manpower
that actually does the coding. We are grateful for any help of course. 
Tue, May 31 2005 15:56:46    Comments added by guest  
Hi,
  thanks for your prompt reply. But I am not very sure whether it is a "wish"
or not. Because to have GRASS in Indic scripts this is a "must" unless we
manage to have a workaround similar to foss4g's chinese and japanese versions
of GRASS
please correct me if I am wrong.
Wed, Jun 1 2005 11:30:34    Mail sent by mneteler  
Hi,

actually I don't fully understand the problem. GRASS 6 is able to
render multibyte fonts also in the Tcl/TK GUI (from UTF-8
encoded .po files).

I have added an example here:
 http://grass.itc.it/devel/i18n.php
 -> Tcl/TK TTF Support (middle of the page)

Screenshot:
 http://grass.itc.it/images/grass6_chinese_zh.jpg

If it works for simple chinese, it should also do for other languages.
But maybe I am missing the point.

Let me propose the following: If you could translate a minimum
(a few messages) and send us the .po file, we can insert it into
GRASS and run some tests. Please indicate which locale/font packages
are needed.

Best regards

 Markus
Fri, Jun 3 2005 09:14:21    Comments added by guest  
HI, I have uploaded partially translated grass po files for Marathi (mr_IN) to
http://indix.ncst.ernet.in:9673/aantarabhaaratii/Members/swapnil/tmp/gis/
locale: mr_IN
encoding: UTF-8
Font: http://www.janabhaaratii.org.in/janabhaaratii/src/fonts/Gargi_1.7.ttf
I have done the translations for demonstration only. They are not final.
Now I will wait for your response.

Thanks in advance
Swapnil Hajare
Tue, Jun 7 2005 06:24:39    Comments added by guest  
I am eagerly waiting for the results of putting our po files in GRASS.
I hope somebody is looking at it.

Thanks
Swapnil Hajare
Sun, Jun 12 2005 08:27:39    Comments added by guest  
Hi, I am still waiting for the response from your side. Did you check the
partially translated po files with GRASS ? 
Swapnil
Tue, Jul 5 2005 00:11:00    Taken by mneteler  
Tue, Jul 5 2005 00:12:11    Mail sent by mneteler  
Hi,

I am eagerly waiting for your response. Did you test it?
The file is in GRASS 6.1-CVS for a while now. You can
either update from CVS or use the GRASS 6.1 CVS snapshot.

Is the file name ok or do you want me to rename it to mr_in?
Currently we have:

 grass61/locale/po/grasslibs_mr.po

Best

Markus
Tue, Jul 19 2005 23:09:03    Mail sent by mneteler  
Hi,

no response so far, so I assume that it works well.
It does at least for other Asian languages.

Markus
Tue, Jul 19 2005 23:09:06    Status changed to resolved by mneteler  
Thu, Dec 22 2005 15:01:48    Comments added by mneteler  
I have added Hindi .po files and tested them, works.
Also GUI and map display works, see screenshot at

 http://grass.itc.it/devel/i18n.php
 http://grass.itc.it/images/grass61_hindi_hi.jpg

Markus
Thu, Jan 5 2006 10:44:41    Comments added by guest  
hi,
I sincerly apologise for not responding to number of comments by netler
because of which he thought that the bug is resolved. I have just posted a
mail on grass devel and userlist which shows that it is not resolved. I wish
to open the bug again.I have attached snapshot also which shows that the
problem is not resolved.

Thanks and regards
Swapnil Hajare
Thu, Jan 12 2006 15:33:52    Status changed to open by mneteler  
Thu, Jan 12 2006 15:36:56    Mail sent by mneteler  
Hi,

originally you posted

> "If it sounds ok, can some 2-3MB code of Indix2 (indic Shaping Engine) be 
> included in grass code to claim something like "GRASS GIS supports 
> 11 Indian Scripts" ?

can you described in a detailed way what you want to be done,
or, preferably, publish CVS diffs?

Thanks

 markus
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