Some (semi)political troubles at college kept me from blogging for the past few days - though now it seems that things have cooled down considerably. The good news is that during the past week, I have been spending quite a lot of time in the three of the computer labs in the college, helping setup Fedora Core 3 on the machines for the 3^rd year students (who have system administration in their current semester) . We are trying to go with FC3, though in some boxes with really flaky hardware, we are going for Ubuntu (the latter’s installer seem less sensitive to bad hardware than Anaconda). I plan to do a demo session on kickstart and installation over http very soon.

Of recent, I have also been looking at OOo 2.0 beta. It seemed to have some issues with Bangla rendering, so I had to come up with some patches for ICU (OOo uses ICU for handling complex scripts in Unix like systems). Now Bangla renders fine with most of the fonts (as Soumyadip tested it out). The only major remaining issue is the wrong positioning of some of the matras for certain fonts (and this seems to affect to all Indic scripts). I haven’t looked into it in detail, but this seems to be a result of OpenOffice.org’s lack of support for GPOS based kerning. Currently this makes the Lohit-Bn font from Redhat unuseable on OpenOffice.org 2.0, which is a real pity.

During the last weekend, I also uploaded a new version of the Font Converter’s Guide. At this stage, I think it may be a good idea to merge this document with the Ankur Developer’s Guide. The Developer’s Guide also needs some content on various encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc), ISCII, and maybe some documentation on the code layout and structure of Bengali script related modules in some of the commonly used Free rendering engines. Volunteers are wanted for this.