Re: Urdu Unicode website [Was: Novice question]

From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Thu Mar 25 2004 - 06:33:27 EST

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    Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr> va escriure:
    >
    > In my Windows XP, I have four keyboard layouts proposed for the Urdu
    > language: "Arabic (101)", "Arabic (102)", "Arabic (102) AZERTY" and
    > "Urdu", plus the keyboards for the Brahmic/ISCII transliterations in
    > India,

    What for a kind of keyboards is that?
    XP generates Unicode, doesn't it? How can you made it generate ISCII
    (besides inside an application, of course)?

    Or are you meaning INSCRIPT instead?

    > and the Tavulesoft "Urdu" keyboard layout, all of which can be
    > added simultaneously to the language bar are selected from there.
    > Isn't that enough?

    [ Still do not see the relationship with web sites... ]

    > I don't see where is the issue there. May be it's only for Windows
    > 2000

    If you are refering to the discussion about Urdu, the issue is that Peter
    Constable pointed out that Urdu was "supported" (using naskh style, that is)
    in both Microsoft Windows 2000 and Microsoft Windows XP. Apparently the DLL
    for the Urdu keyboard slipped away or something from the shipping of Windows
    2000, and the patch once available is not any more online. This was pointed
    out to Peter, and he is now trying to improve the situation within
    Microsoft. So Urdu typists with access to a Windows 2000 box might have in
    the near future a supplementary option to type their language. Windows XP
    users are not affected in any way by this discussion.

    As Peter correctly noted from day 1, all this stuff is not very important,
    since Urdu users really expect nastaleeq style, so either they are not using
    Urdu support, or they use proprietary solutions which extent remains to be
    explained by competent persons.

    > (and of course Windows 9x/ME which does not support easily
    > multiple layouts,

    This is news to me.
    What it does not support easily are other scripts like Gurmukhi or Bengali,
    particularly on input ;-). Neither do the supplementary Arabic characters
    needed for Urdu, for instance. For this very reason, one of the first
    answers to the original question, made by Edward, correctly pointed out that
    testing on 9x or 16-bit boxes would be probably useless.

    > and where Tavulesoft Keyman is probably a good solution).

    Tavultesoft (<URL:http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/>). I do not know the
    extent of it. I am not competent this about. Their home page does not seem
    to target specifically at the Urdu market, and historically they did not.
    So I have no clue about the real extent of this solution to type Urdu into
    IE/Gecko/Opera on 9x. I am not even sure it is really helpful (have to see
    with WM_UNICHAR support, as you probably know; Peter should be able to tell
    us if it works with IE; about Gecko, a quick search on mozilla.org returned
    no matches...).
    And of course if you have to type it first into Wordpad or Word then
    cut-and-paste, well surely Unipad is a better solution then... and
    definitively they are not operational.

    Antoine



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