[Indic-computing-devel] Free UCS outline font

[Primoz P. <pri...@bi...>]

Dear gentlemen,

Encouraged by the URW++ release of core 35 PostScript fonts under the
terms of GNU GPL and the steady improvement of the PfaEdit PostScript font
editor <http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/>, I set myself a goal to compile a
set of free (GPL-ed) outline fonts covering a range of ISO10646/Unicode as
broad as reasonably achievable. The partial results of this effort are
available on the project page, <http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/freefont/>=
=2E

As Indic scripts seem to remain Unicode's largest grey area, I was very
happy when Prof. Hariharan told me of this project, as it seems that a
large portion of knowledge is concentrated here.

As a first question, I would like to ask whether there is any agreement on
the sets of ligatures needed to render particular Indic scripts, i.e.

* a minimal set, e.g. for use in email (for instance, like the lam-alif
  in Arabic)
* a practical set, e.g. for use on WWW or in newspaper (required to
  typeset a modern language)
* a maximal set, including all glyphs needed to render traditional texts,
  including rare or theoretical ligatures

So far, I know of three sets of ligatures for Devanagari alone:

* Frans Velthuis' Devanagari metafont (cca. 120 ligatures)
  http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/language/devanagari/
* Prof Joshi's Raghu font (468 ligatures)
  http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/download/font/
* Indlinux Devenagari font (204 ligature)
  http://www.indlinux.org/fonts/

It would be nice if they would somehow correspond to the above three
categories... :)

What is the situation with other Indic scripts?

With kind regards,
Primoz Peterlin

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