On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 04:44:02AM -0800, Nitin Nimkar wrote:
> And I'm discovering that (OpenType) fonts allow far more
things that
> I would have believed.
If you help me understand this, I will be obliged. I have 10
Devanagari Open Type fonts which need improvement for Marathi.
A good
introduction to font making is at
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/overview.html . However it definitely
takes time to learn all that.
> Most of them just look like minor design differences. However if
it
> really matters, OpenType (used in most modern font types) allow a
> font to have different versions (shapes) of a same character, as
> well as to have different kind of ligatures, matching given
> languages.
Yes they are minor from technical point of view, however it has
significance, particularly for wide acceptance across the community.
Moreover the proprietary font makers, who have vested interests,
highlight these differences to misguide a common man who is not
technical savvy. I am experiencing this in Marathi. Even today after 9
years of existence, UNICODE is little understood by common man,
decision makers (bureaucracy), politicians whose support is needed to
avoid avoidable simple problems.
Common man shouldn't need to know what
Unicode is. It should only
"work". But I agree with you for other people.
If you go to
www.maharashtra.gov.in which is state government site,
which is in English but is not able to speak common man's language.
That one is
a real shame. I thought web sites using hacks with ascii
characters and proprietary unstdandard fonts were history. Maybe you can
tell send them an e-mail (written in Unicode Marathi) to explain why
they should use Unicode, insisting of the fact that, the current way,
their site isn't indexed at all by Google.
> OpenType (used in most modern font types) allow a font to have
> different versions (shapes) of a same character, as well as to have
> different kind of ligatures, matching given languages
I will appreciate if you could help me understand this. But to do
this, first, somebody has to Modify the given font. Am I right?
Yes, you're
right. I lack time to work on that but I made some tests and
read some doc. I modified Lohit Hindi font to tell it to do the "Marathi
L" when Marathi language is required.
I managed to understand how to do with Fontforge. I verified the result
with the pango-view testing program. However it seems there are not much
program actually this Opentype feature.
The languages settings in OpenOffice are only used to "determine the
dictionary used for spellcheck, thesaurus and hyphenation, the decimal
and thousands delimiter used and the default currency format". I think
it has to be patched. I'll have to look at what ICU can do.
I wasn't lucky with Firefox either. The "lang" HTML attribute isn't
used
to choose the language in the font. The only way I got it using the
Marathi L was to run Firefox in a mr_IN locale context. It used the
Marathi whatever the web page language, but at least it means it can use
this feature some way. It just needs to be improved (patched).
>
http://www.omkarananda-ashram.org/Sanskrit/sanskrit2003.zip Do
you
> have any idea of this font's license? It's not written inside the
> font file and their web site doesn't give information either.
Best way will be to inquire with them. I will do that and will inform
you.
Any news? If not already done you could advise them to use the OFL
license. See
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/faq.html#license .
By default people who don't think seriously about the question tend to
use proprietary license even when they are not actually against free
use.
--
Bernard Massot