suruma

Well, if you are after the latest mobile phone that offer various functionalities apart from making a call, sending SMS etc, stop there! There is a little pocket computer called Ben NanoNote carrying the Openmoko legacy made by Qi Hardware which promote copyleft hardware. All mobile phones in the market are both non-free (in terms of software) and closed (in terms of hardware), even though some pretend otherwise. I think NanoNote has a very good potential because it can double as PDA, ebook reader, gaming console, DAP,offline wiki reader etc. You can carry a low end mobile for being connected to the world.

The projects like Openmoko and Wikireader didn't really take off owing to various reasons. One can also remember the fate of the much hyped Simputer as well. I hope this will not happen in the case of NanoNote. Ben NanoNote is built upon open hardware specs and is based on a MIPS compatible SOC. It runs on FreeSoftware called OpenWrt. (I would like to switch over to the blob-free LibreWrt once it is ready). People have already ported Debian to NanoNote. So, its possibilities are not limited. The small form factor and low cost factor can also attract people interested and commited to FreeSoftware. More so, in the case of students as it comes with Python, Lua etc. pre-installed, so that they can have a whiff of these languages. Its present status is somewhat geeky, though. But that should change soon.

The Ben NanoNote I bought unfortunately does not have support for usb host. The next iteration NanoNote, Ya will have that. Technically, the microSDIO slot supports wifi/bluetooth adapter devices. NanoNote boots to Debian off microSD comfortably. You can even run an X session. Right now it is targeted towards developers who can turn it to a multi-function device.
Technorati Tags: NanoNote, FreeSoftware, OpenHardware, OpenWrt, Debian, MIPS, Qi-Hardware

There have been efforts to combine real browsing with Emacs experience. Conkeror is one such example. But, conkeror only provides an emacs-like navigational experience. It is borne out of a Firefox extension and is based on Gecko. On the other hand, ezbl , an infant written in pure Emacs Lisp, uses uzbl. Uzbl is a webkit powered framework and is built upon unix philosophy. Ezbl essentially takes care of the configuration/control stuff. It runs an instance of uzbl inside emacs patched for xembed support. For more information visit the developer's blog.

Technorati Tags: FreeSoftware, Emacs, Browser, Web

Fontik can be used to tweak and configure some properties of fonts. These settings are usually set system-wide while installing the fonts. The power of fontconfig is thus limited when it comes to the user. The user can definitely override or enhance these settings, but for that, he has to manually edit the ~/.fonts.conf each and every time. This GUI tool performs some these tasks.

Currently Fontik can be used to:

• Set hinting method for for individual fonts.
• Add alias (an alternate name for the font which can be picked up by applications) for a font.
• Tweak matrix size of font if needed. (Playing around with this is not recommended usually,though).
• Blacklist fonts if the user doesn't like them or they take precedence over other fonts of similar family.

Gnome apps  honour these settings while, somehow, KDE apps don't. Maybe, KDE has its own font management  methods.

Fontik is available from Gitorious.

Many Malayalam letterforms take spiral shapes. Eg. 'ത' 'ര' 'ഞ' etc. The letter 'റ' can be considered as the basic unit or the building block of almost all Malayalam letterforms. The shape of 'റ' can be derived either from a circle or from a spiral. But from the general nature of curves that occur in most of the letterforms and the way they are hand-written, one can easily say that the shape of 'റ' is more closely associated with the spiral. Many calligraphic and ornamental styles in Malayalam stem from this property of letters. In fact, one can easily feel the spiral flow while writing some Malayalam letters like a 'തൃ' or a 'ശ്രീ' (by the traditional way, off course) on a level surface using a smooth stylus. Letter shapes of other dravidian languages also share this property.

Designing Malayalam letter shapes using spiral curves can be handy because it can give more faithful representation of the contours. It also provides great easiness while drawing such letter shapes when compared to bézier splines. The galaxy of spirals ranges from the simple logarithamic one to the more exotic varieties.

The spiro library(GPL'd) by Raph Levien makes use of clothoid spiral curves (aka Euler spirals) for drawing smooth curves and then converting them to bézier splines. Spiro is now incorporated in FreeSoftware like Fontforge and vector graphics editor Inkscape.

Try to attempt designing a Malayalam letter using bézier splines(quadratic or cubic) and clothoid splines. The result will be faster with latter and the satisfaction will be more, too. Getting the same result is tiresome if one starts with the former.

AGPL, Google, FreeSoftware, Cloud, Web 2.0

<?xml version='1.0'?>

<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>

<fontconfig>

....

    <selectfont>

        <rejectfont>

            <pattern>

                <patelt name="family" ><string>Font1</string></patelt>

            </pattern>

            <pattern>

                <patelt name="family" ><string>Font2</string></patelt>

            </pattern>

        </rejectfont>

    </selectfont>
....

</fontconfig>

$ svn checkout http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/TRUNK xetex

http://scripts.sil.org/svn-view/xetex/TRUNK.tar.gz?view=tar

$ ./build-xetex

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}

\usepackage{xltxtra}



\def\meera{\fontspec[Script=Malayalam]{Meera}}

\def\rachana{\fontspec[Script=Malayalam]{Rachana}}

\def\suruma{\fontspec[Script=Malayalam]{suruma}}



\begin{document}



%\fontspec[Script=Malayalam]{Meera}

\title{\rachana മലയാളം സീടെക്‍ പരീക്ഷണം}

\author{\meera സുരേഷ്}

\date{}

\maketitle



\begin{center}

{\fontsize{14.4}{10}\meera

സീടെക്‍(\XeTeX) ഉപയോഗിച്ചു്

ഒരു മലയാളം ടെക്‍(\TeX) പരീക്ഷണം.

}

\vskip 2pt

{\fontsize{12}{10}\rachana

സീടെക്‍(\XeTeX) ഉപയോഗിച്ചു്

ഒരു മലയാളം ടെക്‍(\TeX) പരീക്ഷണം.

}

\vskip 2pt

{\fontsize{12}{10}\suruma

സീടെക്‍(\XeTeX) ഉപയോഗിച്ചു്

ഒരു മലയാളം ടെക്‍(\TeX) പരീക്ഷണം.

}



\end{center}



\end{document}

\usepackage[rachana]{mlym}

\begin{document}

.....

.....

.....

\end{document}

Unicode, Tex, Malayalam, Unicode

This is how it is done

m17n-config --version

1.5.2

libotf-config --version

0.9.8

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/sources/emacs co emacs

cd emacs

./configure --without-carbon --with-x --with-toolkit-scroll-bars --with-jpeg --with-png --with-rsvg --with-tiff --with-xpm --enable-font-backend --with-freetype --with-xft --with-x-toolkit=gtk --without-hesiod --with-dbus --with-libotf --with-m17n-flt --no-create --no-recursion

make bootstrap; make all

./src/emacs -q

make install

(defun setup-malayalam-rendering()

  "Setup Malayalam rendering"

  (interactive)

  (set-fontset-font "fontset-default"

            (cons (decode-char 'ucs ?\x0d02)

              (decode-char 'ucs ?\x0d6f))

            "Rachana")

 (set-char-table-range

   composition-function-table '(#x0d00 . #x0d7f)

   (list (vector "[\x0d00-\x0d7f\x200c\x200d]+" 0

      'font-shape-gstring))))

M-x setup-malayalam-rendering

And enjoy reading and writing neat Malayalam text in the Emacs buffer!

GNU, Emacs, Malayalam, Unicode