Tamil in Yudit

By Thuraiappah Vaseeharan <t_vasee@yahoo.com>
Mon Dec 24 20:45:55 CST 2001

Introduction

Yudit<http://www.yudit.org> is a free (as in beer and speech) Unicode editor
written by Gaspar Sinai. It is the first open source editor to fully support
Unicode text creation in Tamil. 

Currently, the following fonts have been tested to display Unicode Tamil text. 

a. code2000.ttf shareware font. It is an OpenType Font with proper layout
 tables for Tamil. If you have a similar font, it should work as well.
b. TSCII (http://www.tscii.org) fonts: If you don't have code2000 font,
you can use any tscii font to _display_ tamil text.  Note that TSCII is used
only for displaying text. The file will be read/written in unicode (UTF-8) format.

Installations

Follow the instructions from http://www.yudit.org

1. It is usually as simple as,
./configure
make 
make install (as root)

By default the yudit executable is installed in /usr/bin/ directory. Other files
will be placed under /usr/share/yudit.

2. Download the code2000.ttf font from http://home.att.net/~jameskass/
and copy it into the /usr/share/yudit/fonts or ~/.yudit/fonts
If you want to use a TSCII font that you already have, just copy it in one of
the above directories.

3. Edit /usr/share/yudit/config/yudit.properties or
   ~/.yudit/yudit.properties and add the 
   font file name in the field "yudit.font.TrueType"

e.g.
yudit.font.TrueType=code2000.ttf, Arial.ttf, ...
yudit.font.TrueType=TimesTSC.ttf:tscii, Arial.ttf, ...

Don't forget to add the ":tscii" suffix after the filename of TSCII fonts!

4. Start Yudit. Switch the fonts to truetype. Type test in the command window.
You'll get a multi-lingual document. Near the end, you should be able to see the
famous Tamil verse "Yaathum Uure Yaavarum Kelir". 

5. Click on the keymap button and add Tamil to the available keymaps.  Change
the key map to Tamil. Now you can enter tamil text.  The default keyboard is a
romanized keyboard similar to the Murasu Anjal keyboard. See
/usr/share/yudit/src/Tamil.kmap for the complete map.

Enjoy!

********************************************************************************
If you find Yudit useful, write a note to Gaspar Sinai <gsinai@yudit.org>
and say "Nandri (நன்றி)"!
********************************************************************************
