Dear Mr. Bernard Massot,


>>A good introduction to font making is at
>>http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/overview.html . However it definitely
>>takes time to learn all that.

Thank you very much for this link. It is awesome. 

>> 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.

Myself and my friends have written them but so far no further development. 

>>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.

I do not know about this. Some of my friends tried to use Fontforge. But so far they are not successful in it. 

>>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 am aware about this feature in Open Office and I think it works fairly well. However there are no dictionary and spell-check facilities available for Marathi. Again somebody has to take the responsibility and do it. 

>>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).

My Firefox browser is set to mr_IN setting so it should be able to do what we are trying to do.  

> > 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.

Yes, I got a communication from them and they say that it is free to use Font but not an open standard font or open source font. However, I got to know that same group who has developed Sanskrit 2003 have developed Chandas.ttf which is a True Type Font  and is under GNU General Public License as per their web page declaration.  It is available on http://www.sanskritweb.net/cakram/ . On the same webpage they have also made available Volt Project files for font designers. I am aware about Volt but have never used it. 

Thanking you 

With Warm regards,

Nitin Nimkar