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

[Dr. U.B. P. <pav...@vi...>]

>From:Primoz Peterlin <pri...@bi...>
>
> > 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...

The Kannada OpenType font Tunga that ships with XP has 407 glyphs 
which is more than enough for printing almost any book in Kannada. In 
the OpenType font that I am making, I have knocked off some glyphs 
from this set. Some publishers ask for some special glyphs for 
printing Sanskrit scriptures in Kannada, music notations, etc. In 
OpenType font we can add these extra glyphs in the Private Use Area 
of Unicode. To get these glyphs in the text that we type, we will 
have to send their respective Unicode values. In OfficeXP this is 
done by typing the Unicode value and hitting Alt-X.
 
> 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?

Uniscribe renders the OpenType font. The logic for substitution and 
positioning of the glyphs is supplied by the font. Uniscribe CAN NOT 
create any glyph on-the-fly. Uniscribe works only on Windows2000 and 
XP. It does not work on Windows 95/98/ME.

What we need is a public domain OpenType font rendering engine for 
Indic scripts for all platforms, especially for Linux. Indix from 
NCST is supposed to be one. I have no experience on that. Anyone has?

Regards,
Pavanaja

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja
Editor, Vishva Kannada
World's first Internet magazine in Kannada
http://www.vishvakannada.com/

Note: I don't worry about pselling mixtakes