[Indic-computing-users] Indian language font contest (suggestion from Delhi)

[Frederick N. <fr...@by...>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------

indian language font contest

objective: an inter-school computer events and competitions, a font-design 
contest must be organized. the participants must design indian language 
fonts, from any of the 16 officially recognized languages of india.

vision: indian languages hardly have any choices in indian script fonts. most 
are poorly or even incorrectly encoded. thus a whole layer of language and 
type-encoding, never really developed in india. for example: indian language 
search engines, proper support in industry-standard databases, indian 
language ocr, handwriting recognition, language translation, text to speech, 
speech to text, universal spell checkers and grammar checkers, etc etc etc.

logistix:

1) the correct standard is to encode indian languages using the unicode 
standard. see unicode.org for further info. this is the universal encoding 
system for all languages of the world, past, present, future.

2) the font format must be opentype font. see opentype.org for more info. 
opentype is a single file font. whew! and this single file works across mac, 
win, linux, unix, and even savvy handheld and other devices. (sort of the jpg 
of font formats). the opentype format is also more compact and compressed.

3) to correctly type on 'qwerty' keyboards, the indian language script has 
been standardized on its layout on the qwerty keyboard. this is called 
INSCRIPT. 

4) an exhaustive amount of reference and research material on type, type 
encoding, type design, type file formats, unicode, indian language encoding, 
etc. has bee compiled and made available to the schools on a cd. you are free 
to copy and further distribute this cd, for your own reference and research. 
this reference includes the unicode tables for indian languages, the INSCRIPT 
layout of the keyboard for indian languages, and tonnes of other essential 
stuff.

5) participating school students have to design a hindi language font, based 
on the devanagri script of hindi.

6) the font should be complete, must have all the characters required for the 
full and complete use of the font. all characters are defined in the unicode 
table, provided on the cd.

7) the font should be compiled as an opentype font.

8) to design the font, a free of cost, and freedom-based software, such as 
pfaedit, may be used. this application runs natively on linux. it also runs 
under windows using another application called 'cygwin.'  the online help and 
documentation of pfaedit is excellent and gets any beginner started within a 
few hours of reading thru it.

9) participants may also use other alternative software such as freehand 
fontographer, fontlab3 or fontlab4, or even other software, mentioned on the 
reference cd.

10) a free utility, called VOLT, available from microsoft's website, also 
allows designers to convert fonts natively created as truetype fonts (ttf) in 
fontographer or other apps, to be converted into opentype fonts.

11) the font wil be the copyright and credited to the font designer. the 
designer may name the font anything they wish, as long as it conforms to 
filesystem requirements and naming conventions.

12) the font and even the source file, must be published under the gpl 
license. (www.gpl.org) for more info. in effect, it must be free and 
guarantee certain freedom to its users. and others may also further modfiy 
and refine it.

contest rules:

1) the font design contest will be launched at modern school vasant vihar's 
inter-school computer event, called MODEM, for 2002.

2) the particiapting schools may start designing the font a few weeks before 
the contest, and submit the final file at the contest.

3) the design must be original, and not another existing design ripped off or 
re-encoded.

4) for the purposes of the contest, the participants must bring their source 
material, such as hand-drawn characters which they may have scanned and used 
as templates, as well as test printouts, sample display prints, notes, design 
notes, etc. the display output as samples must be on different media: such as 
desktop bubblejet printers, and especially on postscript laser printers, at 
600 dpi, and higher.

5) full freedom is granted in choosing the design and style: it could be for 
a book's body text, or for decorative displays, or for signboards, or 
whatever style or mood the designers think best.

6) the contest will be evalauted by an independent jury on the following 
criterion:

	a) conforming to unicode.
	b) legibility of design at smallest to largest sizes.
	c) smoothness of the fonts shapes. it must not appear coarse or rough at any 
size.
	d) aspects such as hinting, though optional, will get extra points. hinting 
a font allows it to be tweaked slightly depending on the size and output 
required. this makes a font even more clear and legible. more info on the 
reference cd.

7) a standard, sample of text will be used at the contest, to test the font, 
to ensure it has all the characters and designs.

:-)
linuxlingam