Re: [LAP] font contest

[Guntupalli Karunakar]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2002 18:59:05 +0530
LinuxLingam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> indian language font contest
> 
> objective: an inter-school computer events and competitions, a
> font-design contest must be organized. the participants must design
> indian language fonts, from any of the 16 officially recognized
> languages of india.
> 
> vision: indian languages hardly have any choices in indian script
> fonts. most are poorly or even incorrectly encoded. thus a whole
> layer of language and type-encoding, never really developed in
> india. for example: indian language search engines, proper support
> in industry-standard databases, indian language ocr, handwriting
> recognition, language translation, text to speech, speech to text,
> universal spell checkers and grammar checkers, etc etc etc.
> 
 I appreciate the vision & objective, but I am afraid if the goal of
contest is to have good quality opentype fonts, then contest would
come short of it as font design needs an artistic hand , knowledge of
script/language . A more appropriate objective of contest could be
have contestants design a basic font ( lets say just the Unicode
ranges ).

 Recently one company Cyberscape multimedia ( Akruti ) made available
set of fonts under GNU GPL.
 See http://www.akruti.com/freedom/ . These fonts are 8 bit TTF's. 
But work has started to make them Unicode ones & then Opentype.   Most
of open source Indian language activity in now getting centered around
Indic-computing project , see http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net .
 

> logistix:
> 
> 1) the correct standard is to encode indian languages using the
> unicode standard. see unicode.org for further info. this is the
> universal encoding system for all languages of the world, past,
> present, future.
> 
> 2) the font format must be opentype font. see opentype.org for more
> info. opentype is a single file font. whew! and this single file
> works across mac, win, linux, unix, and even savvy handheld and
> other devices. (sort of the jpg of font formats). the opentype
> format is also more compact and compressed.
>

  Not yet, it rightnow only works on Windoz 2K & XP, and with Indix &
Pango on Linux
 
> 3) to correctly type on 'qwerty' keyboards, the indian language
> script has been standardized on its layout on the qwerty keyboard.
> this is called INSCRIPT. 
> 

  Inscript keymaps are available at  
http://www.indlinux.org/keymap/keymaps.php 

> 4) an exhaustive amount of reference and research material on type,
> type encoding, type design, type file formats, unicode, indian
> language encoding, etc. has bee compiled and made available to the
> schools on a cd. you are free to copy and further distribute this
> cd, for your own reference and research. this reference includes the
> unicode tables for indian languages, the INSCRIPT layout of the
> keyboard for indian languages, and tonnes of other essential stuff.
> 

 Has this CD been already made or in making ?


> 5) participating school students have to design a hindi language
> font, based on the devanagri script of hindi.
> 
> 6) the font should be complete, must have all the characters
> required for the full and complete use of the font. all characters
> are defined in the unicode table, provided on the cd.
> 
> 7) the font should be compiled as an opentype font.
> 
<snip>

> 6) the contest will be evalauted by an independent jury on the
> following criterion:
> 
>       a) conforming to unicode.
>       b) legibility of design at smallest to largest sizes.
>       c) smoothness of the fonts shapes. it must not appear coarse
>       or rough at any 
> size.
>       d) aspects such as hinting, though optional, will get extra
>       points. hinting 
> a font allows it to be tweaked slightly depending on the size and
> output required. this makes a font even more clear and legible. more
> info on the reference cd.
> 

 Hinting of font is bigger task than doing the font itself.

 It would be better to keep things simple & say have the contest to
make just a unicode font. Aim of it would be to identify budding font
designers, then post contest have a workshop with participants where
font experts will guide them more on font design.
 Font design skills would be an added advantage to anyone good in
art/graphics & contests like this would definetly help. 

Regards,
Karunakar