Re: no font shown with tamil.el

[Raja R Harinath]

Hi,

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     > Would you please show me the license of these fonts?  I can check if
>     > it is a free software license.  If these are not free, we cannot use
>     > them in Emacs or recommend them to Emacs users.
>
>     > Also, what is ISFOC?  Is it in India?  Can you tell me how to contact
>     > the people there?  I am on the way to India now, and if these are not
>     > free, I may be able to convince them to make them free.
>
>     Kawabata-san <address@hidden>, please explain about
>     these issues.
>
> This is really the crucial information.  If these licenses are free,
> then we have no problem.  There is no need to work on replacing them
> if they are ok to use.
>
> On the other hand, if these licenses are NOT free, and if ISFOC is in
> India, and if I can meet with them while I am here, maybe I can do
> some good.

ISFOC is a standard from C-DAC (http://cdacindia.com).

  http://www.cdacindia.com/html/gist/standard/isfoc.asp

ISFOC is a glyph-based standard, rather than a character-based
standard -- thus side-stepping the various rendering issues discussed
in the Unicode standard.  The idea essentially is to avoid the
huge-ligature-table problem in rendering Unicode encoded fonts, but
instead standardize on a fixed set of pre-rendered glyph-pieces.

This appears to be a custom solution and needs special case code like
in devan-util.el, tamil-util.el to compose unicode characters by
translation to sequences of ISFOC glyphs.

- Hari
-- 
Raja R Harinath ------------------------------ address@hidden