[scribus-dev] Helping out on rendering of Indic text in Scribus

[Gora Mohanty]

Hi,

  We have been keen on having Indic Unicode, OpenType fonts work
properly with Scribus for quite some time now. Among other things,
we had funded a fellowship through Sarai, CSDS (the organisation
that I work with), for this express purpose. Unfortunately, that
seems not to be proceeding on schedule, but we would still like
to help out with such work, using the time of people at Sarai,
particularly that of Nandeep Mali. I have talked this over with
christoph_s on the IRC channel, and we would now like to move
things forward.

  Nandeep has also joined this list, and has checked out the
Scribus SVN code. It would be great if someone could give him
a few pointers on where to get started. christoph_s mentioned
the existence of some Indic-related code by pierremarc.

  I realise that Scribus developers must be busy with getting
1.3.5 out of the door, and we would be glad to wait till that
is done. We would like to have a time frame of Oct./Nov. of this
year for at least a beta release. Indic rendering in a page layout
application would probably be widely adopted in India, and spur the
acceptance of FOSS. If things go well, we can even consider a
showcase FOSS event in India, centred around Scribus, towards the
end of the year.

Regards,
Gora