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

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

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On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Rajkumar S wrote:

> > 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.

I find this hard to believe. According to
<http://www.portalkerala.com/hevents2.htm>, newspapers have been published
in Malayalam for over 150 years. I am sure that the typesetters had to
make some selection of glyphs?

> > * 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 tw=
o
> 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 th=
e
> original Malayalam script has so far identified about 900 glyphs and stil=
l
> 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.

If you take any Malayalam newspaper, or any textbook, is it typeset in the
written script or the reformed one? I guess we should aim at this, as
people are used to read it.

> I will be more than happy to provide any information to help you to creat=
e
> freely available Malayalam fonts.

Thank you! Not being a native Malayalam reader, I will sure need and
appreciate your help.

So far, I have found three sites offering Malayalam fonts:

http://www.deepika.com/font.htm
http://www.malayalamvarikha.com/font/download.htm
http://www.goodnews-weekly.com/malayalam.htm

None of them are free, so I cannot include it in the GPL-ed font (I can
look at them when I design one, I guess :) None of them seem to contain
more than some 80 ligatures. Do you know of any better?

With kind regards, Primoz

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