Re: [Indic-computing-users] Akruthi fonts need to be encoded

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

--- "Nagarjuna G." <nag...@hb...> wrote:
> 
> We started working with the akruthi fonts with a team of volunteers.
> With these set of fonts I think the following needs to be done.
> 
> 1. First the fonts are not encoded for utf-8 input method.  So the
> font file should be opened in a editor (pfaedit) and cut paste the
> glyphs at the appropriate unicode pages and recreate the fonts.

If you open and save font in pfaEdit then there will be some loss in
quality of glyphs because pfaEdit converts Quadratic-Bezier curves into
Cubic-Bezier curves. That's why I prefer FontoGrapher on windows platform.
Use of Free/OpenSource software is always good but unfortunately currently
we don't have very high-quality softwares fot font editing :(

> 
> 2. The other alternative is to use the existing encoding which uses
> the first 256 characters of the kb, and make a xmodmap file.  May be
> we can use both the strategies.

But then input will become a real pain. Can Akruti people release source
code which work for this particular encoding? It will not only save our
time but also make their encoding more popular.

> 
> I also want the experts to inform me if the strategy is not correct.
> I am just beginning to understand the technology so I may be wrong in
> my decisions.

I had a quick look at the fonts and found that some glyphs are missing if
we want to make this font Unicode compliant. So first task should be to
define new glyphset for this font. We can create new glyphs by using
references to older glyphs. It will preserve outlines. Also change in one
place will be reflected automatically at all other places if we use glyph
referencing while creating new glyphs.

Microsoft's website explains the steps to convert devanagari TTF to OTF:
  http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/volt/devanagari.htm

- Keyur



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