Re: Amharic

From: busmanus (busmanus.lk_at_freemail.hu)
Date: Thu Feb 12 2004 - 21:41:32 EST

  • Next message: Peter Jacobi: "Re: Amharic"

    van den reysen joseph wrote:

    >
    >
    > how to write in amharic with Abiword? I am using Mandrake 9.2 and Abiword
    > 2.0

    Before going into details, let's make clear, that it's not really an
    Abiword problem. It is still quite closely related to it though, so
    I hope nobody will regard the following useless.

    Are you sure Amharic is supported by Unicode? If it is, and you have
    a properly coded Unicode font installed for it, you can just use
    gucharmap (embedded in Abiword or independently started) to
    cut-and-paste its characters into your document.

    If you want to write longer passages in this language, you can try
    defining your own Amharic xkb keyboard using the Unicode code points of
    the required characters, even if there's no "shorthand" codename for
    them (like e.g. "uacute" etc.). I think you need to put a capital U
    before the code point with no space between the two in order to make it
    work in the definition file, like this:

    U03A8 (this should be a Greek capital psi),

    but I'm not quite sure if it's the correct syntax.

    If you have the keyboard, you need to copy it to the directory called
    xkb/symbols (I think the exact path is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols
    under Mandrake) and you need to make it selectable during your X
    session (put in a line for it into xkb/rules/xfree86.lst, and it
    should become visible to KDE's keyboard layout manager). Studying the
    files already in the directory should help you with the syntax of the
    files.

    If Amharic is not supported by Unicode, but you have a font that
    contains the characters required for it, then you need to find out
    which characters' positions are "reused" for this purpose and simply
    type those while using the font. This of course makes your document
    dependent on the particular font used, so it should be avoided if at all
    possible.

    busmanus

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