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

[Pathum E. <pa...@mo...>]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 4:57 AM Anura Tissera <anu...@gm...>
wrote:

> 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
>
> Yes! this project was done in full collaboration with Mr Pushpanada, and
infact we are working on FM Gamunu font with him at the moment.  He is
fully onboard with these projects and Google Fonts granted funds to get his
fonts licensed under OFL

You can see the discussions recorded here:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpw12zH02-An-6i79877NUi_ld3U_4tmv


> This Font was licensed by FM to ANCL (Lake House) for use on Silumina
> Classifieds (trust it is still in use).
>

Can you tell me more about history of Dinamina Font of ANCL? and the
copyright status? I met Dineesha about getting it under OFL license. That
way we can improve and do a new release. So ANCL can use the same font on
web as well. But with the government change it went nowhere.


> 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
>

This was a major concern in our process as well. Increasing the height of
Sinhala could introduce some more complications when its used in web. But
we will definitely investigate this.

[image: Screen Shot 2015-09-23 at 6.40.20 AM.png]


> 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.
>

Yes, this is a known issue. In latin development they call this 'Overshoot'
and this will be fixed in a next release.


> 3. incidentally, the accented characters with 'repaya' needs slight
> elevation adjustments..
>

Repaya glyphs will be refactored in next release, because at the moment it
is rendered with separate glyphs, but in next release we will use
positioning and anchors to do this.



> 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!
>

This is Mahaprana Ja, can you elaborate? Im not sure  what you are
referring to.

[image: Screen Shot 2015-09-23 at 6.31.13 AM.png]


> 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.
>
> We will keep working to make it better :)


> 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).
>
> We have a comprehensive list of glyphs atm counted and verified. But
having more material wont hurt. We are publishing all the material here
https://github.com/mooniak/sinhala-font-tools


> 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've heard about your work at ANCL in different forums and appreciate your
feedback! I took the liberty of cross posting your comments on
https://github.com/mooniak/abhaya-libre-font/issues/23


> 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
>>>
>>
>>
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>