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

[Keyur S. <key...@ya...>]

Hi,

--- Primoz Peterlin <pri...@bi...> 
 
> 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/>.

This is really a very good effort.

> 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.

As far as I know, during last few months our Ministry was
in process to standardize glyph sets for all Indic scripts.
However the technology like OpenType gives freedom to font
designer to define his/her own glyphset. So no
standardization is required for OpenType font. However such
standardization will help in designing fonts in other kind
of technologies. I'll learn more about it when I attend
meeting with our Ministry and other organizations (C-DAC,
IIT-Kanpur, etc.) in Delhi on Saturday.

> 
> * 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
> 
> * Prof Joshi's Raghu font (468 ligatures)
>   http://rohini.ncst.ernet.in/indix/download/font/

Raghu font has 674 glyphs and very much fit in the third
category. We are also planning to design variants of Raghu
font which will fall in first and second category
respectively.

Hopefully within next one year we shall design OpenType
font for each of the other Indic scripts and put it in
public domain.

> What is the situation with other Indic scripts?

According to my knowledge there are two such widely used
standard available currently in India. ISFOC defines
glyphset for each of the Indic scripts. tscii is another
standard for Tamil script only. There may be other
standards which I don't know about.
 
Regards,
Keyur



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