Indic Scripts

TODO: this page needs to be reviewed (See: To-Do List)

Basic Sample

A very basic sample with Indic scripts is the following:

%\definefontfamily [kannada] [rm] [Kedage] [features=kannada-one]
\definefontfamily [kannada] [ss] [Tunga] [features=kannada-one]

\definetypeface [kannada] [mm] [math] [modern]

\setupbodyfont [kannada]

\starttext
ಇದು ಹೇಗಿದೆ? ನಾನು ಹೀಗೆ ತುಂಬ ಬರೆಯಬೇಕೆಂದು ಯೋಚಿಸುತ್ತಿದ್ದೇನೆ.
\stoptext

Supported Scripts

The list of Indic scripts supported by ConTeXt MkIV and LMTX are:

• Devanagari
• Bengali
• Gujarati
• Gurmukhi
• Kannada
• Malayalam
• Oriya
• Tamil
• Telugu

In order to get the proper OpenType features, you need to select the proper feature from the following list:

• devanagari-one
• bengali-one
• gujarati-one
• gurmukhi-one
• kannada-one
• malayalam-one
• oriya-one
• tamil-one
• telugu-one

Depending on your font, you might need instead:

• devanagari-two
• bengali-two
• gujarati-two
• gurmukhi-two
• kannada-two
• malayalam-two
• oriya-two
• tamil-two
• telugu-two

Script Versions

Script tags from the OpenType specification contains second versions for what might be some (or all [I’m afraid I don’t know]) Indic scripts.

Why are those second versions available? From their own explanation:

The OpenType script tags can also correlate with a particular OpenType Layout implementation, with the result that more than one script tag may be registered for a given Unicode script (e.g. 'deva' and 'dev2').

Features ending in -one use the older OpenType implementation, while the ones ending in -two deploy the newer implementation.

Hyphenation

The hyphenation patterns for the following languages are included in ConTeXt:

• Sanskrit sa
• Hindi hi
• Kannada kn
• Telugu te
• Tamil ta
• Malayalam ml
• Bengali bn
• Gujarati gr

A pattern is activated with \language. The Sanskrit hyphenation patterns support hyphenation of Sanskrit written using the Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and Latin with IAST.

Numbers and Conversion sets

The following number conversion sets are available:

• Devanagari devanagarinumerals
• Malayalam malayalamnumerals
• Tamil tamilnumerals
• Kannada kannadanumerals
• Telugu telugunumerals
• Bengali bengalinumerals

for use as values of the keys numberconversion, conversion and with \convertnumber