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Scribus => Text and Typography => Topic started by: Googly Googly on April 06, 2018, 06:36:57 PM

Title: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: Googly Googly on April 06, 2018, 06:36:57 PM
 In India there is a tremendous demand for books which contain more than one scripts in one paragraph.
An example will be sufficient.
A Sanskrit text in Devanagari is translated to Hindi, English and Bengali/Kannada etc  in one book.
Many words from English or any other languages are taken and their meanings are given in 2-3 languages which have different scripts.

This situation calls for a feature for applying fonts of more than one scripts in one paragraph. The size, style etc of each of those scripts vary, fonts being not uniform. MS Office or LibreOffice etc have such provision to apply Latin fonts and Complex Script fonts in one Paragraph.
How to get these results in Scribus? Any tweak?
I am using Scribus 1.5.3.
Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: a.l.e on April 06, 2018, 11:36:24 PM
have you tried with scribus 1.5.3?
this should be possible there...
Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: Googly Googly on April 07, 2018, 01:39:34 PM
Quote from: a.l.e on April 06, 2018, 11:36:24 PM
have you tried with scribus 1.5.3?
this should be possible there...
I am using 1.5.3. If it has this feature then I fail to get it. Further elaboration from you will be very helpful to achieve it.
Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: a.l.e on April 07, 2018, 03:11:59 PM
well, personally, i only speak and write languages using the latin script and i cannot help you further.

i was involved in the project that has lead to the support of arabic in scribus and i really have the feeling that mixing scripts should be supported... but, as i said, i cannot try.

well, i did try:

i've taken the wikipedia page for "arabic"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic

and copied the name of the language in arabic (in the top right corner).

i've pasted it into a scribus frame and it looks similar enough to me, that i consider it likely that scribus supports bidirectional text.

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Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: Googly Googly on April 16, 2018, 11:53:30 AM
Thanks for the reply. I have following to submit.
Selecting one font for complex text and latin text and making both texts readable at a time is possible if that one font has both complex and latin support. But, all those fonts are not necessarily good for publishing work. Those which are good for publishing the complex text matter may not have support for latin text. Moreover, the size, style etc for complex and latin can not be changed individually. We have to accept the size etc which the font forces upon the user. If we look at the Libre Office's character formatting window, its very clear that a Paragraph style provides options to set different fonts, size, style etc for the latin text and complex text. The screen shots of Libre Office are attached below.

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Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: a.l.e on April 16, 2018, 12:31:00 PM
And what happens when you need an indic language and arabic?
Or two indic languages that need different fonts?

Are those real use cases?
Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: Googly Googly on April 16, 2018, 12:57:00 PM
You have rightly pointed out the difficulty. Its not just with latin and complex but two or more complex text in one para. This is a everyday issue with us and due to that we are not using Scribus. We are hoping to get the solution some day in the newer versions. I felt, keeping mum and waiting for next version to solve the problem automatically without even raising the issue, better ask the question outright. I am in academics and many people, students around need the solution. We do not use Scribus due to all such issues. You will be shocked to know that the major publishing houses in India are still running Pagemaker and Windows XP though pagemaker has stopped more than a dacade ago. There is a huge demand for all these solution. The people who design the books they hardly know that such forums can really help. Its mostly because they don't know English well to communicate.
Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: a.l.e on April 16, 2018, 01:48:51 PM
You would be shocked to know that Scribus is Open Source Software and accepts contributions!

You would even be more shocked to know that the current "basic" support for the Indic languages came from a team attached to an arabic university.

And you would never believe that a few years a guy from the south of India (working for a local association) managed to hack a version of Scribus that already supported Indic languages. The quality of his work was not good enough to be accepted in the main Scribus, but his code was working and (as far as I know) has been used for a local magazine.

As far as I can tell, the current situation is as follows:

- Nobody in the Scribus team (and generally in the Scribus community) can speak "non Latin" languages.
- Working on the CTL support *is* hard work.
- India is a huge country with lot of skilled computer programmers.
- India is a huge country with a lot languages that are not supported by a sane combination of modern fonts and modern DTP software.

You might or not be in a position that could help Scribus progress. But I hope that somebody in such a position reads this and helps Scribus improve and fulfill your wishes.
Title: Re: Combining the latin and complex scripts like Devanagari, Bengali in a paragraph
Post by: Googly Googly on April 17, 2018, 01:29:58 PM
I do understand what you mean. However, I don't get paid a single pie for my work lifelong. I have chosen such a path not to earn a single pie. The organization for which I work is in the field of helping the downtrodden and neglected masses. Neither technically nor monetarily can I help the Scribus project. Sorry for that.
Yes, as you said, some programmers may some day come up with some solutions. Till then, we are neglected. People like us who don't have money hugely depend on hard work done by open source software community. I am very much thankful for whatever you guys have done and are doing. Hoping to get things as expected some day in future. I don't pay, hence, can't press any demand.