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

[NMPOST7]

On 07/07/2012 22:32, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
> Am 07.07.2012 um 21:25 schrieb NMPOST7:
> 
>> In fact for the past few years I have used only LaTeX
> 
> LaTeX is a large assemblage of TeX macros, written by Leslie Lamport. It is also a TeX FORMAT (.fmt) 
file and therefore has command line programmes (latex/pdflatex, xelatex,
lualatex) for each TeX engine.
For particular reasons a (Knuth)TeX engine exists which can produce only DVI.
The most widely used engine
is pdfTeX. It is completely compatible with original TeX and produces directly
PDF. If you invoke it by
the name of "latex" it produces DVI. The core of the pdfTeX engine is eTeX (and
therefore it can typeset
in more directions than from left to right). As with original TeX pdfTeX can
only use irregularly encoded
fonts via TFM (TeX Font Metrics) files. XeTeX is another engine which uses the
font services of its host
system and makes direct use of Unicode encoded OT and TT fonts, has no
restrictions to the writing direction
(eTeX), and also uses more than eight bits for the input encoding. The LuaTeX
engine is similar to that of XeTeX,
it does not use font services and tries to perform all font understanding by its
own – which has to be programmed
first. So it still has no knowledge of the Complex Type Layout for Indic
scripts, I think.

Thank you Peter. Well, I know that LaTeX is a collection of macros and the
origin was TeX. What I did not know was there existed other engines such as the
ones I listed.

All these year I worked using LaTeX and was fine. At some point Malayalam came
in and I found out about the package from Sarovar and used it. All went fine.
What I shall do is: use my ancient SuSE 9.3 when I have to write Malayalam AND
German (and obviously English). Use Mac when I do not need to produce
documentation in Malayalam. I shall use Mac for Sanskrit as well.

But Ubuntu does not seem to have any future with me.

The reason why I wanted to avoid SuSE is, because SuSE was taken over by Novel,
that has an agreement with M$! :(

Thanks again and cheers
suren