Internationalized Script Support in Inkscape </head> <body> <h1> Internationalized Script Support in Inkscape </h1> <p> This image at the bottom of this page demonstrates that the Open Type Complex Text Layout (CTL) bug which I reported back in December, 2004, has been fixed as of <a href="http://www.inkscape.org">Inkscape</a> v. 0.41 CVS. This bug was fixed by the end of March, 2005, but I did not get around to verifying the fix until now (May 2005). </p> <p> The original bug report mentioned the problem of over-the-consonant and under-the-consonant vowels and tone marks being placed incorrectly in Thai script only. However that behaviour was expected to affect all Indic and Indic-derived scripts. </p> <p> I later attached <a href="images/InkscapeInternationalTextProblems-16color.png">this PNG image</a> which demonstrated that the bug not only affected Devanagari and the Indic-derived Thai and Lao scripts, but also Arabic. </p> <p> The following image demonstrates that Inkscape now renders at least the following complex text layout scripts (CTL) correctly: </p> <ul> <li>Arabic</li> <li>Bengali</li> <li>Gujarati</li> <li>Hebrew</li> <li>Kannada</li> <li>Thai</li> </ul> <p> It is expected that all other complex text layout scripts supported by the <a href="http://www.pango.org">Pango</a> layout engine will now also render correctly. <a href="http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/iuc27/html/img24.html"> This chart</a> provides a summary of the complex text layout scripts supported by Pango as of December, 2004. </p> <p> You can download the SVG document <a href="./images/i18n.svg">here</a>. I have submitted this document to the Inkscape developers to use as the internationalization example in the <code>share/examples/</code> subdirectory of the Inkscape source code distribution. See my <a href="http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/">Unicode font guide</a> to find out where to download the required fonts (<b>Nazli</b> for Arabic, <b>Akaash</b> for Bengali, <b>Rekha</b> for Gujarati, <b>Sazanami Gothic</b> for Japanese, <b>Kalimati</b> for Hindi/Devanagari, <b>Sampige</b> for Kannada). </p> <p> -- Ed Trager, 2005.05.06 </p> <img src="./images/i18n.png" /> </body> </html>