On 02/11/14 17:58, [email protected] wrote:
Respected Sir,
We are a team of students trying to render Hindi fonts in VIM. We have been
reading the forums and it seems that multibyte characters can be handled in
VIM. We would be very happy if you could give us some pointers on how to tackle
this problem.
We are very enthusiastic about this project.
Thanks,
Sangharsh Aglave,
Final Year Undergraduate,
Computer Science and Engineering,
IIT Kanpur
_____________________________________
Sent from http://vim.1045645.n5.nabble.com
I'm forwarding your question to the vim_dev list
[email protected] which is where questions about developing Vim
are handled, and not only by me — I am just one user among many. Please
subscribe at least to vim_dev and vim_use, they are available (among
others) as Google groups. Also, be warned that in order to fight spam,
we had to make these groups "moderated", so your first post will need to
be whitelisted by a human, which can take hours. Once your first post
gets through, additional ones should need ony seconds turnaround time.
See http://www.vim.org/community.php about the various Vim mailing
lists. They are all available as Google groups, viz., vim_announce,
vim_use, vim_dev, vim_mac and vim_multibyte (note the underscore instead
of the dash of the legacy @vim.org addresses).
Vim can handle multibyte characters, but the problem for displaying in
Vim the scripts of the Indian subcontinent (Brahmi, Nagari, Gujarati, et
al.) is that (a) Vim uses a fixed-size character cell; each character
occupies exactly one cell, or, for East-Asian "wide" characters, exactly
two cells; and (b) Vim displays all characters of a split-window in a
single direction, usually left to right, but for Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi,
Urdu, etc., it can be right to left.
The only way to have the display direction vary from one character or
word to the next, as for instance when mixing English and Hebrew, or
even Arabic text and Arabic-Indic digits, within the same file, is to
forgo the use of gvim and run Vim in a full-bidi console terminal such
as mlterm. When running in mlterm, Vim detects that the terminal can
display full-bidi text and doesn't try to handle text direction itself.
Now Indian-subcontinent scripts display the vowels above, below, left or
right of the preceding consonant (depending on the vowel), and in
addition they use a bewildering number of "complex letters" to represent
sequences of consonants or word-initial vowels. Both of these
characteristics make it practically impossible to display these scripts
in Vim.
I don't want to damp your enthusiasm, but I feel that your task, if
possible at all, will be extremely difficult, and therefore take a long
time will little hope of success. I'd say longer than the time you'll
need to get a PhD.
Best regards,
Tony.
--
There was a young fellow named Ades
Whose favorite fruit was young maids.
But sheep, nigger boys, whores,
And the knot holes in doors
Were by no means exempt from his raids.
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