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

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

On Wed, 6 Mar 2002, Primoz Peterlin wrote:

> 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?

they all choose a subset of glyphs, but the problem is that they choose
different sub set. Since any conjunct in Malayalam can be represented as
combination of base glyps and Halant, even if their are difference in the
actual glyph chosen readability is not compromised.

In general the more the number of glyphs, the better. But you can do with
less glyphs also.

> 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.

It is with reformed script, but some higher quality papers choose to
include more glyphs.

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

It is my pleasure.

> 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?

Take a look at the fonts my Hellingman of Malayalam TeX, which should be
available at CTAN. It is free, though the shapes of the glyphs are not
real high quality.

I will also try to hunt down some good Malayalam fonts as they appear in
newspapers and other print media, If you can send me your postal address
offline.

raj