Kannada and Unicode Page

On Fri, 05 Feb 1999 16:55:42 GMT, in soc.culture.indian.karnataka Arun Sharma wrote:

Here is a mail that I sent to Linux India Linux-india about Kannada fonts, keyboard and editor. If you're interested in working on this, please get in touch with me.

Hello Linux India,

After we had that discussion about CDAC and Indian languages and popularizing Linux, today I made some tangible progress in that direction.

Here's what I did:

1. Send Email in Kannada using HTML
2. Downloaded yudit, a Unicode editor for Linux from www.rpmfind.net yudit-1.2-1.i386.rpm
3. Read www.unicode.org. Specifically, Kannada my mother tongue was listed.
   For the rest of this mail, make s/kannada/your-favorite-language/g
   Basically, unicode has divided the 2^16 characters into language specific blocks and Kannada has been given a block starting at 0x0c80. All major Indian languages have been covered.
4. Then I bumped into the wonderful Unifontpage
   This is a project to capture all the glyphs (images of characters) in one huge font file - so that when someone receives a unicode file with Hindi, Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam all in the same file, they can use yudit to view it!
   Right now, the spaces corresponding to Indian languages is empty since no one has contributed anything.
   The above page also lists the tools required for creating those fonts (xmbdfed). You can use your favorite bitmap editor to generate a hex number and use the perl scripts on that page to do the conversion.
5. To validate that I can actually do it, I downloaded xmbdfed and created "Ka" the first consonant and made a bdf file out of it, installed it in /usr/lib/fonts/unicode, added it to my font path (xset +fp) and xset fp rehash and pointed yuedit to use that font.
   All these steps are detailed on the unifont page.
6. Now I have to somehow input the unicode corresponding to "Ka" 0x0c95.
   How did I do that ?
   Yudit allows you to input characters by typing the hex value of the unicode. I did that and viola! I could see my creation on the screen! We'll have to use this mode of input, until we figure out a reasonable keymap.
7. I did some search in that direction too. Here is a proposed layout from a company that sells Kannada software: http://c62443-a.frmt1.sfba.home.com/~adsharma/fonts/kankey.html
   A Hindi keyboard layout is at:
   http://www.gy.com/www/ww1/ww2/hinkeys.html
   If someone is familiar with CDAC's keyboard layout etc, I can help generate a keymap for yudit.