[Buddha-l] Tibetan Input (was: OOo)

[Christopher Fynn]

Richard Hayes wrote:

> On Wednesday 02 May 2007 01:26, Margaret Gouin wrote:

>> Chris, thanks for your very complete reply. Gives me the complete toolkit
>> to get started!

> I'd like to join Margaret in thanking Chris for his very helpful message on 
> tools for working with non-Europeans languages with Open Office, either on a 
> Windows or a Linux platform. At the risk of complicating the picture a bit, 
> I'd like to complicate the picture a bit.

> Over the years I have found the most powerful tool for producing attractive 
> printed text and PDF files (albeit at the expense of having to do some 
> learning and some work) is the markup language called LaTeX. Originally 
> designed for typesetting mathematics, LaTeX is now used widely by people who 
> need to produce multilingual texts using Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, 
> Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, Inuktitut or even exotic scripts such as 
> Klingon and the various Tolkien languages. 

LaTeX and TeX are indeed fantastic tools for creating handsome printed documents
or PDF files. The commands are a bit like those used on old phototypesetting
machines. A problem was that most TeX implementations  didn't seem
to work with Unicode - which means any text data in 'exotic' scripts like
Tibetan or Devanagari is hard to search, index and so on.

There was a project called OmegaTeX which was supposed to be an adaptation of
LaTeX / TeX for Unicode - and there are apparently some other tools developed
since then: <http://www.indologie.uni-halle.de/software/utf.htm>.

Although I haven't tried it yet the most promising solution may be the XeTeX 
package:
<http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex>
which runs on Mac OSX, Linux
<http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex_linux>
and (just released) Windows (with W32TeX)
<http://www.fsci.fuk.kindai.ac.jp/kakuto/win32-ptex/web2c75-e.html>

- Chris