[Indlinux-group] Before the release of Alpha Lohit Devanagari from lohit2 project

[Pravin S. <psa...@re...>]

Hi All,

    I am hoping now most of the contributors around are aware regarding
the lohit2 project. Before the Alpha release of Lohit Devanagari i think
it is important to go through once again goals we planned for this
project[1].

    Goals:

*    1. Cleaning Lohit Open type tables.*
    Highlights are as below
    - We rewritten all GSUB rules from scratch.
    - New rules are supporting both deva and dev2 script tag
    - Done testing on Harfbuzz as well with Uniscribe and its giving
expected results.
    - Kept GPOS tables intact.
    - Effectiveness and efficiency [2]  (sfd file size is down by 28K
and Binary file side is down by 4K)

    Found one bug w.r.t harfbuzz [3] and looking forward to get it
resolved soon. Presently it is in know issue list.

    By Beta we will have some more improvement on this.

*    2. Reusable Open type tables.*
    We got two important suggestions on this line, so below are
suggestions and action taken on it.
*    1st suggestion*
    To have feature file separate than shapes .sfd file for easy
re-usability of OT rules.
        - Thanks to AravindaK, he has already done some work on that
line[4], so just using those stuff. I have forked this gitrepo and doing
some improvement in it. Once done will request Aravinda to merge with
his repo.

*    2nd suggestion*
    To follow AGL[5] and to have readable glyph naming.  We were also
thinking from this perspective.
        -  This has became a bit complex glyphlist.txt [6] suggest names
like "kadeva" or uni0915. But we dont want to follow uni0915 as it is
not very readable considering our re-usability goals.
        - {0915 (kadeva) + 094D (viramadeva) + 0937 (ssadeva)} following
this create chances of glyph name string more than 31 characters limit.
        - So present plan is follow above "kadeva_viramadeva_ssadeva" as
much as possible and if it goes above 31 characters we will discard
"deva" part from glyphname.


*    3. Following of existing standards/guidelines*
    Dont know how many of you aware regarding "Devanagari Script
Behaviour For Hindi"[7] Draft, so its basically guideline for Font
developers. I have one blog pending on this. Though this is draft mode
we are trying to follow this, since it is very informative and prepared
after consulting to language experts.

    This is where we upto, if anything more needed do provide me your
feedback. Also need to decide on release version, i think some version
with -alpha will work.

Best Regards,
Pravin Satpute





1.
http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. Effective means it should work on all supported platform perfectly
and efficient means compact and clear rule
3. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69266
4. https://github.com/aravindavk/
5. https://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/
6. http://kaz.dl.sourceforge.net/project/aglfn.adobe/glyphlist.txt
7.
http://tdil-dc.in/tdildcTemp/articles/75443Consolidated%20Feedback%20&%20Observations%20on%20Draft%20Devnagari%20Script%20Behaviour%20Ver%201.4.8_June_13.pdf