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

[Rajkumar S <s_...@my...>]

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Primoz Peterlin 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.

Absolutely none for Malayalam.

> * 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)

This two sets are minimally different for Malayalam. In fact their are two
different ligature sets for Malayalam, One is the original written script
which has a lot of ligatures. Mr Hussin who has done extensive work in the
original Malayalam script has so far identified about 900 glyphs and still
counting.

As for the so called "reformed" script which was mainly truncating
Malayalam for typewriting, I am not exactly aware of the exact number of
glyphs involved. but in general it can be taken from some of the CDAC
fonts that are lying around.

I will be more than happy to provide any information to help you to create
freely available Malayalam fonts.

raj