MacDevnag (fwd)

[Gunthard Mueller]

If you want you can use us as guinea pigs... We should focus on Mac and Windows.
I tend to be critical of TeX nowadays, because it's really a dinosaur.
I have been involved in writing converters to and from TeX myself, and we have
supported it here for a very long time. It's time to move on.
What is needed is a Unicode-based and complete coverage of Devanagari (I mean
including all variants, not just the modern "horizontally aligned" character
composition variants), plus intelligent typing wizards for Mac and Windows, which
should allow switching to and from "transliteration mode".
I have written a plug-in for this many years ago, for a graphics-mode text editor
running under--sorry--DOS, but as it was pirated totally we discontinued
development.
Maybe somebody can organize research grants or private sponsorship to set up an
international conference for deciding the Unicode side of things and for covering
the software engineering side.
The Unicode homologation is the expensive proposition, especially as additionally
agreement would have to be won from major OS vendors (Apple, MS, Sun, etc.). The
resulting software engineering is harmless.
Best regards,
Gunthard
gm at e-ternals.com

------------------------------------------------------------------
Gunthard Mueller
Dir.
e-ternals.com / Anthos Imprint Ltd. / Swabian IT Services
Unter den Linden 15
D-72762 Reutlingen
Germany


Dominik Wujastyk wrote:

> Software testers required.  Do you use a Mac, TeX, and Devanagari?
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 17:04:26 +0000 (GMT)
> From: John Smith <jds10 at cam.ac.uk>
>
> Subject: MacDevnag
>
> Someone called Bernard Desgraupes has just emailed me to say that he
> has ported devnag to the Mac, giving it a suitably Mac-type interface.
> If the thing works I think it would be good to add it -- or at least a
> pointer to it -- to the CTAN directory. But Macs are beyond me, so I
> can't test it out. Do we know anyone who might like to try it?
>
> John
>
> --
> Dr J. D. Smith                *  jds10 at cam.ac.uk
> Faculty of Oriental Studies   *  Tel. 01223 335140 (Switchboard 01223 335106)
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