Malayalam: is a pre-processor required?

[JasonVenkiteswaran]

Binary package hint: texlive-lang-indic

The description for texlive-lang-indic says, "malayalam -- Fonts for typesetting Malayalam, with a pre-processor."

Does this mean that the pre-processor is required? If so, is it included in the package?

The malayalam package and help file (mm-usr-0.9.6.pdf) over at sarovar (http://sarovar.org/frs/?group_id=17&release_id=795) indicate that the LaTeX file gets saved as a .mm file. Then the the script mal is run on that .mm file. The resulting output is a .tex file that can be processed with latex or pdftex. BUT, the mal script and the mlym binary that it calls are not packaged with texlive-lang-indic.

If i grab the latest version malayalam-0.9.6.tar.gz from sarovar and install it, then i have the mal script and mlym binary. But I had expected them to be installed with texlive-lang-indic since /usr/bin/devnag and /usr/bin/ebong are installed as part of texlive-lang-indic.

This is all with Ubuntu 7.10 and texlive-lang-indic 2007-12ubuntu3.1.