[LAP] font design references

[LinuxLingam]

excited about designing indian language fonts
to help solve our culture's digital quagmire?
. . .and win a font design contest or two as well?

don't know where to start?

behold! just found some urls scribbled on the back
of palm leafs and mango leafs, from the forgotten chapters
of panini's sutras.

1) unicode it!
unicode is the best way to encode indian languages,
and all languages of the world, past, present, future.
www.unicode.org
www.indlinux.org/links.php

2) opentype the file format.
go beyond truetype or postscript font file formats, of the previous decade.
boldly embrace the new opentype (*.otf) file format. one file format, for all 
operating systems and platforms, one single font file, and highly compact 
filesize. (what *.jpg is to image formats, *.otf is to type, without the 
copyrights and other issues.)
www.opentype.org
www.adobe.com/type/topics/main.html
www.microsoft.com/typography/default.asp
[the adobe site has a huge repository of pdf files that give you the lowdown 
and technical details of anything and everything to do with type. the ms site 
is also quite exhaustive. do check out the VOLT tool on its site]

3) qwerty does devanagri?
how do i type devanagri or other indian language scripts, on the horrid 
qwerty keyboard? use the INSCRIPT keyboard layout. since all indian languages 
are similar, the INSCRIPT keyboard layout is universal for all our official 
languages. the idea is pretty simple: keep all the consonants on one side of 
the keyboard, and all the vowels on the other side. split a varg into two, 
and you've got the entire indian script on a 101-keys keyboard.
www.indlinux.org/keymap/keymaps.php
[search the web for more inscript stuff]

4) want a INSCRIPT keyboard tutor? this one works in dos.
http://www.cdacindia.com/html/gist/down.asp

5) some amazing downloads on indian languages, as well as a good source of 
references and resource, by the Department of IT.
technology development for indian languages (TDIL)
http://tdil.mit.gov.in/

6) okay, so you wanna whip those bezier curves into shape and design the 
font, character-by-character? you need pfaedit. this free and freedom-based 
software, published under the gpl license, is similar to fontographer, the 
commercial font design tool from macromedia. pfaedit has a graphic user 
interface, the provided documentation, tutorials, and reference material is 
excellent. read the fine manual. and get started. did i mention pfaedit works 
natively on linux, and needs another free software called cygwin to work 
under winXX? cygwin gives you a unix-like environment under win, including 
the Xwindows....
http://pfaedit.sourceforge.net/
http://cygwin.com

[btw, pfaedit works under gnulinux, solaris, irix, freebsd, netbsd, macos/x, 
openVMS for alpha.
u may also find some other tools mentioned on the ms and adobe site, but most 
of these are proprietory, commercial, and some not updated for quite some 
time]


7) what's gpl, in english? the gnu public license, that guarantees freedom in 
software. find out more about freedom-based software.
www.gnu.org

still need some more hand-holding?
goto linux-delhi.org, subscribe to a mailing list, preferably the 
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (for the moment) and tell us how deeply you searched 
for answers before posting your query (!).

get inspired, create some indian language fonts under the gpl license.
recite the lat lakaar of the font dhaatu:

fonttii, fontta, fonttanti,
fontsii, fontha, fontthhaa,
fontaami, fontaava, fontaama.

:-)

LinuxLingam