[Indic-computing-users] [Indic-Computing] Indic Font Workshop

[Vijay P. S. A. <vi...@ek...>]

Hi!

There are a few updates after the last announcement on the OTF workshop 
to share with the community. We had been trying our bit to resolve some 
of the problems, concerns, issues raised by the members in the list, 
which are definitely correct, understandable and required action. There 
had been an off-line debate on the topics and some issues got resolved 
as well as some support has came about, hence this announcement. It has 
also been recommended by some of members that all debates on workshop 
issues should be done on lists only. So here it is for all the member 
for open debate as well as there is strong appeal to the members 
particularly those who wish to develop open source tools for development 
of OTF, hence developers of tools and applications and other those who 
suggest alternate standards as against limitations of Unicode for Indian 
languages as discussed in Indic-Computing workshop Sept 2002 and again 
many time in the Indic-mailing lists.

This debate has been suggested to be only limited to "users" list so 
that it does not clutter "devel" & "standards" list. However for this 
time it is being posted on all lists, so that all members who are 
interested should join in users list (if they are already not subscribed 
there).

Some of the major issues that had been raised by members are:

1) Why OTF, open standards Vs Proprietary tools for development, simply 
the debate "How open is OTF"
2) Unicode/OTF - How relevant for Indian languages, concerns and 
alternatives
3) Registration Fee issue
4) Travel support & Honorarium for speakers
5) Sponsorship

At sponsorship front we have some good news to share, we have received 
some sponsorship that would help us now to offer some concessions to the 
participants.

SARAI, New Delhi (thanks to Ravikant) has agreed to cover the cost of 
travel of the speakers upto a total of 25,000 Rs (III AC, Train only, 
might not cover all speakers, hence limitations, those who can afford 
should please afford). Although we are still waiting for confirmation 
from CHIPS, who have agreed to sponsor logistics and food, but we can 
well assume that the same might come, as has been assured by Aman Grewal 
(thanks to him) [if it does not alternative would be suggested #]

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

In view of the new developments and the concerns of the members we are 
happy to announce:

1) To change the name of workshop to "Indic-Font workshop" and include 
in the workshop agenda the issues raised by Koshy, Hemamurthy, Nagarajan 
& others and have a debate on relevance of OTF for Indian languages and 
alternatives. Then the workshop would functionally focus on OTF related 
issues and at the same time bring up other issues and alternatives as 
well. Incase there are not enough people to volunteer to take up the 
relevant topics such as open-source rendering technologies like 
Graphite, how Omega handles typesetting of complex scripts and make a 
presentation on the same in the workshop, (Once confirmed these sessions 
could be added in the existing agenda), then this would be an opentype 
only workshop (then the existing agenda would stand).

The existing topics besides OTF that are already part of agenda are:

a. Sunil Abraham, Mahiti, Bangalore, would arrange for an IPR (cyber 
laws) lawyer Lawrence Liang, who would discuss the issue of OTF openness 
after understanding the Adobe & Microsoft agreement on release of the fonts.
b. Development of Otf from Ttf (Akruti) & other fonts experiences: 
Karunakar, Nagarjuna, Ravi Pande, Raj Kumar, Sayamindu???
c. Open/free software tools for Otf development: M Arun ?????

Suggested Topics: VOLUNTEER, SPEAKERS & SESSION LEADERS NEEDED, also 
suggest additional topics relevant here

a. Alternate standards best for Indian languages, RKK ??? - Hemamurthy
b. Generic transliteration rules framework for Indian languages (input 
sequence & in context with display rendering)/Nagarajan
c. Open-source rendering technologies like Graphite
d. How Omega handles typesetting of complex scripts
e. Nepal case study; Nepali Font Standardisation Project: Amar Gurung???
f. Any more ?????????

We need a volunteer here to coordinate the open source sessions along 
with OTF sessions which Dr. Pavanaja is coordinating.

2) We are dropping the Registration Fee (as announced earlier) and would 
have a nominal registration fee of say 200.00 Rs. which could be 
submitted by participants at the time of registration. The amount 
collected thus would be for logistics/CD/reading material etc

3) Its is agreed that Speakers would voluntarily share there 
experiences, they shall not be provided any Honorarium, in view of 
concern raised by members.

4) All participants would have to travel at there own cost.

# We would request (if CHIPS support do not come) all participants to 
pay for there food and mattress/pillow rent (if they are staying in 
hostels). Those who are making there own staying arrangements, it is 
fine. We shall arrange for the food in mess on confirmation and 
participants can directly pay.

Lastly we hope that members would come up to volunteer for the sessions, 
if it is needed that workshop dates be extended from the present, to 
accommodate some of the open source topics (after confirmation of 
speakers), it could also be done. Till then the present agenda and dates 
would hold. We have already started getting applications from 
participants, those who are yet to submit can please write to me at 
<vi...@ek...>. We are also in process of putting up an online form 
for application, which shall be announced shortly.

We hope to move ahead with this workshop towards regional language 
focused workshops soon, we would request all members to keep thinking of 
them also.

regards

vijay

-- 

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya
ekgaon technologies
email: vi...@ek...
website: http://www.ekgaon.com


Revised workshop Agenda:
---------------------------------
---------------------------------


Indic-Computing Consortium announces
-------------------------------------

First National Indic-Font Workshop

Date: 28th to 30th March 2003
Venue: PESIT, Bangalore

Sponsors:

PESIT, Bangalore
Vishwa Kannada, Bangalore
DeepRoot Linux Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore
Chattisgarh Infotech Promotion Society, Raipur
Sarai, New Delhi
Indlinux.org, Mumbai
ekgaon technologies pvt. ltd, Madurai

Indic-Computing Consortium:

The Indic-Computing Consortium is an initiative of software developers, 
businesses and academic institutions to help evolve appropriate 
standards, resources and technologies for the Indic-Computing community.

The Indic-Computing Consortium is designed as a national-level 
participatory organisation that serves as a common forum for discussion, 
information exchange and advocacy on behalf of all parties interested in 
the development of Indian Language Computing. The consortium aims to 
make true access of computing possible for Indian people by enabling 
support in local language.

A framework is being built for creation of a hierarchy of participatory 
consortia, which would facilitate broad regional and local participation 
in the standardization and development process from a variety of 
stakeholders with differing areas of expertise and specialization. It is 
aimed that these consortia be participatory and inclusive to properly 
represent the viewpoint of local developers, users and other 
stakeholders. In step two, Indic-Computing Consortium would encourage & 
support formation of state-level consortia for each regional language, 
which could include participants from the following key member groups:

- Developers: Software developers and managers developing local-language 
tools
- Technologists: Academics and other experts in encoding and 
representation issues
- Users / Practioners: Government agencies, publishers, NGOs and other 
major users of local-language software
- Linguistic Groups: Academics and other experts of the linguistic 
features of a language and it's script

Working closely with the State Government, this state-level consortium 
would serve as the representative body for deciding standards and other 
technical decisions for computing in a given regional language. The 
major roles to be carried out by the state-level consortium would be as 
follows:

- Discuss various technical, linguistic and practical issues related to 
computing in the regional language
- Serve as a capacity-building and educational resource for small 
regional software developers and users
- Publish documents, tools & other materials helpful for local-language 
computing and development
- Represent the regional language at National consortium meetings
- Represent the regional language at International Standardization 
consortiums and proceedings such as Unicode and ISO

In September 2002 Indic-Computing organised its first National workshop, 
which aimed at finding the various problems faced by the developer 
communities and issues related to standardization, technical support, 
policy and tools. To know more about the consortium, workshops and other 
initiatives, visit us at
http://www.indic-computing.sourceforge.net

The workshop:

One of the working groups formed at the first Indic-Computing workshop 
was for development of OTF & issues related to language standardization 
and representation in international consortium. One of the action point 
and agenda for the group was to Hold OTF training workshop for 
developing major Indian language OTF fonts. Dr. U B Pavanaja took upon 
to hold and coordinate this workshop and Mr. Abhas Abhinav proposed to 
coordinate for logistics & sponsorship, Mr. G. Nagarjuna proposed to 
help coordinate with Akruti for making available fonts to be used for 
develop OTF. This group succeeded in its tasks making this workshop 
possible, Akruti released some free fonts to be used for conversion to 
OTF, which were taken up by some of the language groups (for more 
details on the language groups and the major issues being dealt by it 
please go through the proceedings of first workshop at our website)

Some of the major concerns raised by the language community were:

i. Developing good look fonts
ii. Development of open source tools for rendering and hinting of OTF 
fonts (currently OTF development uses proprietary tools)
iii. Finding font developers for all Indian languages and coordinating 
the group
iv. Making available fonts to be converted to OTF

This workshop seeks to address some of these issues and others enclosed 
in the workshop program as under. This is the first national workshop on 
the subject, while it shall focus on OTF, but it shall equally share 
concerns of open standards community and would have talks, demos and 
training sessions of open source tools, as well as various alternative 
technologies for Indian fonts. We propose to take up more regional 
language font workshops in future to give focused attention to each 
language, these workshops would be held all across India in different 
parts and would hold training programs and technology demonstration. We 
invite volunteers who would take upon to hold these workshops and 
provide coordination & logistics support. The Indic-Computing Consortium 
would provide necessary technical support and capacity building to these 
regional groups.

Why OpenType?

OpenType is an extension to TrueType, and uses Unicode as standard for 
character encoding. It also provides additional tables for defining rich 
set of mappings between characters and glyphs. It also provides for a 
having a large glyph set and even glyph varaints. All the features 
provided by OpenType format can be made use by having a application 
independent, preferable system level library with a api interface usable 
by applications.

For Indic script processing OpenType tables like GSUB (glyph 
substitution) and GPOS (glyph positioning) gives font designer to define 
his rules on what conjuncts or combinations could be made available. 
Application programmer is relieved of the burden of knowing all the 
linguistic part. Also OpenType sort of makes the concept of glyph 
standard or font encoding standard redundant, again giving font vendors 
freedom to follow their own glyph sets and not really affecting the 
application. To summarize OpenType provides lot of benefits to Indic 
computing and also renders redundant some issues faced in Indic computing.

There has been an ongoing debate on whether OTF is right for Indian 
Languages. The debate is relevant and contextual also. One of the 
perspectives penned by G Karunakar in support of OpenType is here for 
participants to explore. However the debate goes on and we invite all to 
participate in it on the Indic-computing mailing list. Please go through 
the attachment why_otf.txt for more on OTF fonts.

Who can participate & pre-requisites:

" Any developer/company/organization having interest in language 
technology and interested to learn development of OTF, understanding of 
Unicode, various technologies for Indian languages and related issues.
" Pre-requites
" Understand how to make a font
" Knowledge of Unicode
" Have a font that it/he/she can use for lab time
" A willingness to keep trying until it/he/she understands
" To get comprehensive information on pre-requisites mentioned above 
please go through the following links

" Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for Indic scripts
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/indicot/default.htm

" Building OTF
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/intro.htm

" Details about VOLT
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/volt/default.htm

" Unicode FAQ about Indic
http://www.unicode.org/faq/indic.html

" Unicode code charts
http://www.unicode.org/charts/

(More links would be added subsequently on various development work on 
open source font technologies)

How to participate:

i. The workshop is by registration only, last date of registration in 
20th March 2003
ii. Participants interested to participate in the workshop should send 
there applications to Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya <vi...@ek...>. 
Shortly an online applicatiion form would also be made available.
iii. Application format
" Name
" Organisation
" Communication Address
" Whether participating in individual capacity or representing your 
organization
" In either case please write in 200 words your interests and what do 
you expect from the workshop
" If there are more then one participant from your organization/group 
please provide the numbers and communication address only.
iv. The registration fee of Rs. 200.00 is to be paid in cash by the 
participants on the first day.
v. Participants please note that all registered members would get, 
literature, CD with important font development softwares, lodging and 
boarding for three days (also dinner for the night before the workshop 
starts).

Contacts:

Participants are advised to contact the following for there queries:

Dr. U B Pavanaja: <pav...@vi...>

Technical clarification, sessions of the workshops, required 
preparation, fonts etc

Mr. Abhas Abinav: <ab...@de...>

Logistics, Lodging & Boarding, Venue etc

Mr. Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya: <vi...@ek...>

Workshop registration application, coordination, any other issue not 
covered above

Instructions for Participants:

1) The participants are advised to go through the pre-requisites and 
equip themselves with necessary knowledge on font & Unicode standard.
2) The staying arrangements are from the evening before the day of start 
of the workshop. Dinner would be provided for the night also, for all 
participants reaching before 9.00 PM only.
3) The lodging & boarding provided by PESIT is in hostels & mess, and is 
modest by all means. Participants who wish to opt out of this 
arrangement can make there own staying arrangements. Please notify the 
same to us, also it is expected that the lunch would be taken by all the 
participants irrespective of there place of stay at mess only as there 
is not much time available in between the session.
4) The staying arrangement in the hostel is till 3rd day evening, it is 
expected that the participants would vacate the rooms by evening.
5) PESIT is at outskirts of Bangalore, participants are expected to make 
there own arrangements for local travel, as nothing could be provided by 
the organizers.
Venue & how to reach:

PESIT (PES Institute of Technology)
100 Feet Ring Road,
Banashankri  IIIrd Stage, (Off. Mysore Road)
Bangalore
Phone: (080) 672 0007

For participants arriving at Airport, take a prepaid taxi to the above 
address, the place is known to the prepaid stand.

Directions from Airport:

Airport Road--->Domlur signal--->Inner ring road--->Koramangala-
-->BTM Layout--->Banneraghatta Road--->100 Feet (outer) ring
road--->PESIT on 100 Feet (outer) Ring Road

For participants arriving at Railway station & Bus station, best is to 
take a prepaid taxi to the above address, the place is known to the 
prepaid stand. A Bus is also available

Directions from Railway Station:

Station--->Chamrajpate--->Ashram--->Hanumant Nagar--->Hosakerehalli

--->PESIT 100 Feet Ring Road




Workshop program: (to be revised after confirmation of more speakers)
-------------------------

Day-1:

09:00 - 09:45 Registration
09:45 - 10:15 Welcome & Inauguration  J Koshy / Director PESIT
10:15 - 10:45 Overview - Pavanaja
10:45 - 11:00 Tea break
11:00 - 11:30 Planning glyph repertoire - Pavanaja
11:30 - 13:00 Introduction to Indian scripts, Character set, tools & 
Glyph Design & current trends in fonts- Ravi Pande
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 - 15:00 Testing glyphs, Generating Fonts, Font format - Ravi Pande
15:00 - 15:15 Tea break
15:15 - 17.15 Lab: Define glyphs and fill out repertoire
17.15 - Tea & informal interaction

Day-2:

09:30 - 10:15 Encoding - J Koshy
10:15 - 10:45 Introduction to OTF - Pavanaja
10:45 - 11:00 Tea break
11:00 - 11:30 Open Type Tables - Pavanaja
11:30 - 13:00 Introduction to VOLT - Pavanaja
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch break
14:00  Lab: Open type tables

Day-3:

09:30 - 10:15 Testing - Pavanaja
10:15 - 10:45 Hinting  Pavanaja
10:45 - 11:00 Tea break
11:00 - 11:30 Digitally signing the font - Pavanaja
11:30 - 13:00 Fonts on Linux - Karunakar
13:00 - 14:00 Lunch break
14:00  Lab: Open type tables

Special presentations proposed:

a. Sunil Abraham, Mahiti, Bangalore, would arrange for an IPR (cyber 
laws) lawyer Lawrence Liang, who would discuss the issue of OTF openness 
after understanding the Adobe & Microsoft agreement on release of the fonts.
b. Development of Otf from Ttf (Akruti) & other fonts experiences: 
Karunakar, Nagarjuna, Ravi Pande, Raj Kumar, Sayamindu???
c. Open/free software tools for Otf development: M Arun ?????