Telugu

texish sets the Telugu script with the syllable shaping it needs. Like Devanagari, Bengali and Gurmukhi it is written left to right, so it needs no bidirectional reordering; what it needs is work inside each syllable, and that work falls differently in Telugu than in the others. The engine segments a run into orthographic syllables and shapes each one — fusing consonants with their vowel signs, building the subscripts, moving the sign that belongs to the base, and positioning the marks — all automatically from text typed in the usual Unicode order.

The Telugu font

A Telugu face, Noto Serif Telugu, is bundled in a regular and a bold cut. Select it with \font telugu:

{\font telugu 14 regular
తెలుగు ఒక సుందరమైన భాష.
}

{\font telugu 18 bold నమస్కారం!}

(As with the bundled Hebrew, Arabic, CJK and other Indic faces, the in-browser Scala.js build does not ship the Telugu font, to keep the download small.)

What the engine shapes

Everything below happens automatically for any run set in a Telugu font — you type the characters in reading order and the engine does the rest.

A consonant and its vowel sign fuse into one glyph. Where Devanagari sets a letter and a sign beside it, Telugu usually draws the pair as a single form: కి is one glyph, not two, and so is each of కా కీ కు కూ కె కే కొ కో.

Joined consonants hang beneath the base. A consonant joined to the next by the virama does not stand in line but is drawn as a subscript under the base — the second క of క్క, the త of స్త. This inverts which consonant is the base: Devanagari’s is the last consonant of a conjunct, Telugu’s the first, with everything after it underneath. Words like పుస్తకం (book) and స్నేహితుడు (friend) stack this way.

The vowel sign is set beside the base, not after the subscripts. A sign is typed after the whole conjunct but belongs to the base alone, so the engine moves it back across the subscripts to reach it — in ప్రేమ (love) the vowel joins the pa and the subjoined ra hangs below the pair, and in స్త్రే it moves back across two subscripts. Without that move the base and its sign never meet and the font cannot fuse them. The vocalic r signs (ృ, ౄ) are the exception: they are drawn below the syllable themselves and keep their place after the subscripts, as in సంస్కృతం (Sanskrit).

There is no reph. Unlike Devanagari and Bengali, a word-initial ra with a virama does not rise as a mark above the syllable. In ర్క the ra stays an ordinary base and the following consonant subjoins beneath it.

Two-part signs are split. The ai sign ై is one character in memory but is drawn as an e sign plus a length mark; the engine splits it so both parts land on the base — హై, as in హైదరాబాద్ (Hyderabad).

The anusvara and visarga follow the base. They are set as spacing marks after the syllable: కం, కః.

Setting a paragraph

Telugu sets in ordinary running text: the line breaker finds its breaks at the interword spaces exactly as for Latin, and only the shaping within each word is special. A whole Telugu paragraph needs nothing beyond selecting the font.

{\font telugu 12 regular
ఇది తెలుగు లిపిలో వ్రాయబడింది. ప్రతి అక్షరం ఒక హల్లు మరియు దానితో కలిసిన అచ్చుతో
ఏర్పడుతుంది, మరియు రెండు హల్లులు విరామంతో కలిసి సంయుక్తాక్షరం అవుతాయి.
}

Because Telugu sets left to right like a Latin text face, it uses the same TeX-style punctuation shorthands: `` and '' become curly quotes, --/--- en/em dashes, and ... an ellipsis. (The right-to-left Hebrew and Arabic faces do not — their quote conventions differ, so those documents type the marks literally.)

The bundled scripts/telugu-demo.script sets a full page covering each of these features.