Re: [sinhala-technical] LKLUG Font Update and Packaging Abhaya for Linux

[Anura T. <anu...@gm...>]

Hi,
as Dr. Ruwan has pointed out, with the blessings of Font Master (Mr.
Pushpananda) ;
 and seeing the development effort by all concerned, I thought I should put
my 2 cents worth

This Font was licensed by FM to ANCL (Lake House) for use on Silumina
Classifieds (trust it is still in use).
to get a closeer character height with the English font we used (when
mixed) in print, we scaled the font by 20% (if I remember right). however
it was not enough (I felt later).
1. I see that problem on your font, but not as significant as it was - but
has room for improvement ... I guess
2. The Sinhala characters in general have curved bases (similar to English
characters like 's' 'e' 'o' etc... ) .. if you see closely you will notice
the Sinhala characters are slightly elevated than the English characters,
to overcome that we did a baseline off set (-5 to -10 RUs if I remember
right ) - it is a tedious process as each glyph need this correction. (look
at a good English font in a Font development package, you'll see the offset
on 'rounded base English characters.
3. incidentally, the accented characters with 'repaya' needs slight
elevation adjustments.. and 'mahaprana ja' looks like a made-up (two glyph
combined) character where as it has a separate glyph.. similar aesthetic
improvements are required... to make it better!
in my opinion: overall it is good, but can be improved as this is the best
fast reading font in Sinhala (counter part of Times Roman)... you may need
to put a little more effort and improve this.

Dr. Ruwan can request Dineesha (of Lake House) to get a full chracter set
printed on a film (I trust the films are still available) or printed on a
laser printer with FM Abhaya to compare (if the laser printer supports
Type1 fonts.. old ones did)... (we had quite a good glyph/character set).

BTW, I may not be able to help much as I don't have access to Sinhala font
resources. This is off my memory.... I may not be accurate in my comments.
( I was seeing your Sinhala charatcers on my chrome book)

I greatly appreciate you effort!

Good Luck,
Anura




On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Pathum Egodawatta <pa...@mo...>
wrote:

> CC Randika, a friend at Mooniak, working on opentype and build system for
> fonts.
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 4:27 PM Harshula <har...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> Hi Pathum,
>>
>> 1) I think I added you to the sinhala-technical mailing list a few
>> months ago. Feel free to request feedback on your font on that list.
>>
>> Will do.
>
>
>> 2) LKLUG font is deprecated and not recommended.
>>
>> Yes,  But there is not other Sinhala Font Family for GNU/Linux at the
> moment. All the GNU/Linux distors depend on LKLUG for Sinhala support from
> what I've seen. Packaging Abhaya Libre would be the immediate
> solution. Dhanishka has offered to do this for Fedora. Im not familiear
> with how to do this (Im a designer :) But Ideal solution would be to do a
> custom GPL/OFL licensed font for GNU/linux UI. We could do a Sinhala
> version for Fedora's Lohit family, or GNOME's Cantrell font family.
>
>
>> 3) The glyphs in your Abhaya font look remarkably familiar? Can you tell
>> me a bit about its origins?
>>
>> Its the FM Abhaya font, refactored and optimised for web and screen.
> http://mooniak.com/abhaya-libre-font/tests/
>
> We expanded it into 5 weights and now it has its own custom Latin glyph
> set as well.  You can see a comprehensive description here:
> https://github.com/mooniak/abhaya-libre-font
>
>
>> cya,
>> #
>>
>> On 23/09/15 00:35, Pathum Egodawatta wrote:
>> > Hi Harshula,
>> >
>> > I am font designer and a free software enthusiast. Would love to have a
>> > chat with you :) Have some questions about your early work with LKLUG
>> > and would like to discuss about future of LKLUG font.
>> >
>> > You can see some of our projects here.
>> > https://github.com/mooniak/
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Pathum
>>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> sinhala-technical mailing list
> sin...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sinhala-technical
>
>