[OS X TeX] Malayalam and other Indian languages on Mac

[NMPOST7]

On 07/07/2012 21:02, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
> Am 07.07.2012 um 17:27 schrieb NMPOST7:
>> \documentclass[dvips]{article}
> 
> Why are you setting dvips as DVI to PostScript convertor? PdfTeX can do that in one step. And produce PDF, not just PS which needs to be converted to PDF in another step.

earlier I was using [a4paper]. After I kept on seeing the message "a4paper not
used anymore" I looked upon the web and saw this usage. However, I wasn't sure
of this option.

>> \usepackage{fontspec}
>> \setmainfont[Script=Malayalam]{AnjaliOldLipi}
> 
> Here you are using XeTeX. What is the relation of dvips to XeTeX? (There is, if at all, only a very small list of 
packages or class files that need to be told the name of the TeX engine.)

I copied that example from one of the mails here. In fact I did not even know,
that there was something called "XeTeX"
>> \begin{document}
>> മലയാളം    malay\=alam
>> \end{document}
>>
>>
>> when compiled the Malayalam letters remain. The other letters are in sans serif
>> but the accent disappears! :(
> 
> Does the font have ā? (With the XeTeX engine you can use the xunicode package to construct accented characters from the ASCII character plus some accent.)
I do not know. My assumption was the engine would use the Malayalam font for the
Malayalam script and the usual fonts for the English/German text. I need to look
up the documentation for XeTeX for the accents.
A bit confused now as to what I need to use. Earlier I knew only TeX and LaTeX,
later on I heard of PdfTex and now XeLaTeX and XeTeX. Am not sure any more what
I need to use :(

In fact for the past few years I have used only LaTeX, but then I had only two
languages to deal with English and German. When I used Malayalam or in fact even
Sanskrit I was still on Latex but I never had used Unicode directly.


Greetings
Suren