Re: [Indic-computing-standards] ISFOC - is it a bird, is it a plane ...

[Keyur S. <key...@ya...>]

--- Alok Kumar <al...@ya...> wrote:
> Hi,
> What is ISFOC?
> Is it a font encoding standard, or a script rendering engine, or
> "something
> else"? To what extent can it be and has it been used for standardization
> of font and/or character encodings as the case may be?

ISFOC stands for Indian Script FOnt Codes. Yes, it is proprietary font
coding standard used by C-DAC. In ISFOC there is a separate glyph layout
scheme for each of the Indic scripts. In such a scheme, a "character" shape
may be composed of one or more glyphs. For example, there may be two
separate glyphs, e.g., Half-Kha and a vertical bar to represent full form
of letter "Kha". There are converters which convert ISCII codes to ISFOC
codes; though such converters are not publicly available. However few
people tried to write such converters by looking at the layout of ISFOC
encoded font. As you can predict, font coding standards doesn't pose much
problem for printing, shaping, etc. But on the other hand you can't expect
"rich" (rich in features) typography with such font based coding scheme.
Also, you can't perform operations like searching, sorting, efficiently
with such font based coding scheme. The best way to use such font based
standard is to use them as an intermediate layer. Higher level can still
operate on character codes and such font based codes at the lower level can
come into picture only at the time of rendering.

AFAIK, the ISFOC standard was taken as a base for newly proposed
glyph-based coding standard for Indic scripts (See Vishwabharat@TDIL
issues).

Emacs-Unicode has implemented Indic support based on ISFOC standard by
writing Unicode->ISFOC conversion rules. Visit
http://www.m17n.org/emacs-indian/index.html

- Keyur


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