Recently, a number of old questions about typesetting South Asian languages have resurfaced in the review queue and on the front page. Many of them boil down to, “How do I write in this language with LaTeX?” and might be closed as duplicates. There’s not a lot of discussion of them here, but these are the native languages of more than a billion people. We should try to make a web search give them a complete and up-to-date answer, and one that keeps up with new developments such as HarfTeX.
In addition, we have tags for indic, and someone recently created brahmic-scripts. I admit I know very little about the distinction, although I note that the Unicode consortium calls Brahmic scripts a subset of Indic scripts. There are tamil and hindi tags, but not for most (any?) other South Asian languages. All or nearly all modern packages that can handle Devanagari can also handle Tamil.
Note that some languages, such as Sanskrit, are commonly written in multiple scripts.
So, how do we clean this situation up?
- Burninate brahmic-scripts?
- Make brahmic-scripts a synonym of indic?
- Declare them different and edit questions about tamil and a few other languages to remove indic and add brahmic-scripts?
- While we’re at it, do we want one canonical question for “How do I write Tamil/Kannada/Hindi/Sanskrit/etc. in LaTeX?” Should at least three of the eight (as I write) tamil questions, and several more “How do I write in Tamil?” that weren’t tagged, be closed as duplicates?
- Or just leave well enough alone?
indic
tag (orindic-scripts
?) should be preserved too. I don't know the termbrahmic
in the context of scripts, so I have no strong opinion on it, but I think I would either delete it or make it a synonym ofindic
. – Alan Munn Jul 8 '19 at 3:02babel
orpolyglossia
, select language, set font for that language, write using UTF-8. – Davislor Jul 10 '19 at 16:49brahmic-scripts
is that almost no question asker will tag the question with it — people think in terms of languages, not scripts, as you mentioned above. And even those who think of their particular language's most common script will not think of the umbrella term for all such scripts; I'd imagine most people in India aren't even aware of the term “Brahmic scripts”. – ShreevatsaR Jul 13 '19 at 2:56