Tuesday, 10 September 2013

" To Write Efficient And Effective Open Type Specification For Indian Script Fonts "

Introduction:

                            As we know, Lohit is a font family designed to cover Indic scripts and released by Red Hat. The Lohit fonts currently cover 11 languages: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu.
                            
                             I am currently working on Lohit Fonts[3]. So this blog is specifically for the things on which I am working.

1) Glyph Renaming :

                     Previously there were no proper glyph names assigned to the glyphs in the fontforge application (rather they were not that user  friendly i.e. not in user readable format. They contained the combination of unicodes from which that glyph or letter has been formed ) But now the task of glyph renaming has been done which can be one of the important thing for writing of rules.Previously there wasnt any file maintained for the glyphs & its typos' but now it is available in the file named "testdeva" on the link provided [3].

             We are sure this will help in reusability of OT tables


2) GSUB rule rewriting :

                    As of earlier the task of GSUB rule writing is already been written but there were many issues that need to be handled. Presently the rules for Basic Shaping forms (like "nukt,rphf,pref,blwf,half,vatu ") & Presentation forms(i.e pres,abvs,blws,psts,haln etc) has been completed.
As in reference for the information about the feature the link can be useful[4]

  Basic motivation behind this was existing open type specification is not providing sufficient information for Indian script and font developer need to create guess work while writing Open type tables. So we want to have one specific guidelines for Indic scripts.

        So basically we can add and update this standard while rewriting open type tables of Lohit.

for any details feel free to contact.

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2
4. http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/devanagari/intro.html

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