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

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

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Hello,

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja wrote:

> > the PfaEdit PostScript font editor <http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/>,
> I went through the manual pages. I did not find info on how do I add
> the OpnType Layouts. Currently I am creating a OpenType font for
> Kannada using Microsofft's VOLT.

PfaEdit is a rapidly evolving piece of software. I believe that the main
reason why it doesn't support it yet is that none of its current users
felt any real need for it. I am sure that commercial font editors are more
advanced, but then again, their support teams don't reply to bug reports
in the matter of minutes, either... :)

> > 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,
> As far as Kannada is considered, tere is a standard. There is also a
> free Kannada script software (for Windows) available for FREE
> download at http://www.bangaloreit.com/html/education/Nudi.html. The
> s/w includes the standard font (glyph set).

Thank you for the URL, I'll have a look.

> For OpenType font, we need more glyphs. There is no need of any font
> glyph set standard for OpenType font. It is the job of the rendering
> engine (Uniscribe on Windows XP) to display the font properly.

I realize that the glyph set is an "open set", to which glyphs can be
added, should the need arise. What I meant by an agreed set of required
ligatures needs not necessarily be an official standard. But on the other
hand, I believe that newspapers and textbooks are printed in all major
Indian languages, so a century(-ies) ago, well before any computers,
typesetters had to make such lists. I would guess that printing scholarly
publications, poetry etc. might require a richer set of glyphs, but
nevertheless, I would like to have some goal...

On the Uniscribe engine... I have been reading the Microsoft Typography
pages, and wasn't smart enough to guess whether Uniscribe simply
substitutes the right ligature for the given sequence of characters (using
the GSUB table?), or has some smart way of actually *creating* the needed
glyphs on-the-fly. You seem to have some first-hand experience with it,
perhaps you could help me?

With kind regards,
Primoz

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