Fedora 6 gives one of the best support for Indic (Indian – South Asian) languages. It compiles its default Web Client, and Mail client with Pango Support to enable the complex rendering of the Indic fonts. The Default Firefox and Thnderbird thus harness the true power.

Enabling Hindi Support

Login as a root user, and then use the following command.
yum groupinstall <language>-support
In case of Hindi, I’ve used, yum groupinstall hindi-support

This will install basically three things.

• Hindi fonts
• SCIM, Simple Common Input Method
• Open Office Hindi Language Pack

Once done, Just run scim-setup from the console, to setup the SCIM for the first time, and then Log-off and log-in again.

Configuring Hindi typing

One of the major hurdles in using Indic languages is to type them. But SCIM’s magic works like a charm. On logging back again, you’ll find a small box in your System tray, Just right click on it to select the type of input format you want. Here is the list that it specifies

• English/European
• Hindi – inscript
• Hindi – itrans
• Hindi – phonetic
• Hindi – remington
• Hindi – typewriter
• English/Keyboard

I prefer Hindi – phonetic, which basically maps the keyboard for its syllables and consonants. For eg.

हिंदी = hiMdI

The user can always switch between the input methods, by clicking the system tray icon, and selecting the input method as English/keyboard.

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