Re: Report: Debian Packaging Workshop at COEP
in-line :-
On 08/01/2017, Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs@researchut.com> wrote:
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> Thank you for the update and Thank you for the work all of you are doing
> for
> Debian.
>
> Do your students have interest in improving Indic support in Free Software,
> in
> general ?
>
> One obvious area is translation, which I think is decent enough for Indic
> support. Another good work done is by the folks who created the Hinglish
> Keyboard Input scheme (Bolnagri).
>
> But, for long, I've been curious on how we could improve other areas, like:
>
> * Indic font rendering in PDF. Should we care? Is PDF deprecated ?
Is PDF deprecated - not at all. And I would say it isn't just an issue
with indic font rendering in pdf but even browsers in general.
Just like we have CSS web safe fonts, we need to have indic web safe fonts
http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css_websafe_fonts.asp
We need something similar for indic languages. I have been to too many
sites where it doesn't render well. There should be at least some
standard or something stating that if the user doesn't have X fancy
font then it should render in something readable.
This is also part of accessibility because if the font doesn't get
render properly, then blind people who use machine voice will get
garbage due to (GIGO = Garbage in Garbage Out).
So lots of work needs to be done there.
I have added chandrakant who has worked for many years on the subject.
He is part of mozilla and C-DAC L10n as well as in i18n. He could be a
good guide on the subject. I am no expert as well but do guess that
most of the work that needs to be is more upstream work and then
getting that work into Debian.
Maybe Chandrakant could share if in the upcoming GSOC's if there are
any projects that students could look at and profit .
> * Indic font rendering in Console and Pseudo Terminals.
> * Indic dictionaries - I think this is something sorely sucky right now. To
> the
> best of my knowledge, our lexical databases are lagging far behind and are
> incomplete. And not everything is electronically available.
> * Then there is auto translator, for Eng => Hin.
as well as translate from Hin => English or Mar => Eng and vice-versa.
As shared by Ritesh.
I do remember Chandrakant sharing last year that there was going to be
some initiatives on improvement of open lexical databases either by
GOI or some other organization but didn't hear anything after that.
Maybe he could shed some light as to where we are as of date.
>
> I should also disclaim that my knowledge on these subjects is very limited.
> I'm
> just trying to see if there are others who could be motivated to steer in
> those
> areas.
+ 1
> Ritesh
Actually even the poppler library needs quite a bit of help which I
had been seeing for quite sometime but finally took the first step of
reporting it upstream.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99304
So yeah, there is lots to play around. There is possibility that
poppler would also be a project for GSOC this year as has been for
previous years.
--
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal शिरीष अग्रवाल
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