Re: [Indic-computing-devel] Free UCS outline font

[Guntupalli K. <kar...@fr...>]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002 11:18:16 +0100 (MET)
Primoz Peterlin <pri...@bi...> wrote:

> 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/>.
> 
> 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.
> 

 Not all  scripts have officially standardized glyph set, except for
Tamil & Kannada.

> * 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/

  This font was worked keeping in mind the above categories, we
started from minimal to practical and in future to a maximal . So
Currently it satisfies the first two. This font will be soon released
under GNU GPL (now that it has finally got a sponsor :-) .

> 
> It would be nice if they would somehow correspond to the above three
> categories... :)
> 
> What is the situation with other Indic scripts?

 There are the Bharatbhasha shusha set of fonts which take the minimal
approach , available at http://www.bharatbhasha.org.in/ They cater to
the scripts - Devanagari (Hindi & Marathi), Gurmukhi, Bengali,
Gujarati.

 For Kannada, an organisation Kannada Ganaka Parishat (
www.ganakaparishat.org ) has done glyph standardisation (contact
person: Dr U B Pavanaja < pav...@vi... > )

 For Tamil , A glyph standard called TSCII has already been evolved.
  http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5180/tnet99.html 
 http://www.geocities.com/Athens/5180/tscii.html

 For Telugu there is no standard yet but a GPLed font is available at
(http://chaitanya.bhaavana.net/fonts/). It has a rich set of glyphs,
and can cater to first 2 categories. I am making a opentype version of
it.

Dont have much info. about other scripts ( Gujarati, Gurmukhi,
Bengali, Oriya )

Regards,
Karunakar