9. Printing
This section is all about getting high-quality Tamil
output in printing. While it is one issue to load a binary font
and start using Tamil in Linux, if your work is
to destroy the forests, you need high-quality printing too!
9.1. LATEX
LATEX
is perhaps the mother of all typographic systems. It frees the
author from the trivia of typesetting and concentrate on
the content. It does not use the WYSWYG input,
but the end result is great. Recent developments are centered
toward internationalization. Unfortunately lack of unicode
standard does not permit Tamil to be tried under the more
ambitious Omega Project. Once again, workaround is the only
way. A first step in Tamil has been attempted by Thuraiappah
Vaseeharan. You may get the the package from the tamillinux.org
site. The tar ball contains a great readme file that
describes the installation and usage. The tamiltex package
does a short work by keeping all related stuff under one
directory (which means that you need to keep your work under
the same directory to compile your source files). But the great
thing about this package is that it is compatible with both
TSCII and TAB encodings and the results are just what you
would expect from a
LATEX
package - great!
9.2. Postscript
Many Linux applications use Ghostscript to print, which
means that you must have Ghostscript configured if you want
to use Tamil in printed documents. If
LATEX
is there, can PostScript be far away? Not thanks to Vasee.
Set the environment variable GS_FONTPATH to point
to your TrueType font directory. For example, I have:
GS_FONTPATH=/usr/local/share/fonts/tamiltt
export GS FONTPATH
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You should be able to view Tamil PostScript files.
9.3. PDF
As of now, the only source to create PDF files is the
PDF package. If you are able to successfully compile your
source with the tamiltex package, use
pdflatex source.tex
to generate the PDF file. You should be able to view it, using
xdvi or Adobe's Acroread for Linux.
Free eBook: 
