[Cross-Posted ]
26 NOV 2002, NEW DELHI.
Two school students, Avneesh Chhabra (15) and Shivaas Gulati (15) designed a
Hindi Devanagri font for an inter-school contest. They won the event,
received assurances from Microsoft that the Seattle-based company may be
interested in licensing the fonts from them, and then, on 25 November 2002,
decided nevertheless to publish the fonts under the freedom-based Lesser Gnu
Public License (LGPL).
Wow!
The fonts will be published on the Indian Linux User Group Delhi website,
www.ilugd.org, and people across the world are free to download, to use, and
to modify, and to modify the fonts as they feel fit, under the LGPL license
(www.gnu.org for more info.)
The decision to release it under the LGPL has been made by them so that those
making embedded systems that may not be published under GLP-ed firmware, such
as cellphones, handheld computing devices, consumer digital/electronic
devices, etc. could still use the fonts under the terms of the LGPL license.
quite far-sighted.
Even generic software that may not be published under the GPL license, such
as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Microsoft Reader, or the several varieties of
eBook viewing software, could use the LGPL-ed fonts.
To boldly say no to Microsoft's offer and to go the LGPL way, especially in a
country like India, and that too for such young students, is rather
revolutionary.
Am sure Fred in Goa, for instance, may wish to research and do an article on
this, both for indian and for international publication. What motivated them
to move towards free software, despite our education system being so closely
dependent and almost governed by the whims of the proprietory-software
companies? Why did they say no to a potentially lucrative deal, and give away
their work for free, when even our governments, policy-makers, and even the
media, explores the significance of free software to a developing country
like india with extreme reservations and caution. Would be nice if this gets
to see the light of the day at the OSDN (OpenSource Development Network).
Would appreciate if others could spread the word of this across to others as
far and as wide as possible.
The school students groped their way around on their own. Briefly, they
searched and downloaded a fully-functional demo software from the web, called
"Font Creator Program 3." They then hand-created the glyphs, digitised them,
touched them up in a raster app, and finally imported them into FontCreator.
The software automatically traced and generated a truetype version of the
font.
The font aesthetics are good. However, several things need to be done, and
the students hope gurus, peers, and experts will guide them further.
Things-to-Do:
i) keyboard-mappings need to follow INSCRIPT.
ii) the unicode assignments need to be verified.
iii) hinting codes need to be generated.
iv) the font needs to be converted into OpenType.
The students are willing to learn further. They are looking for experts to
conduct a workshop at their school (perhaps a few months later once the
dreaded final exams are over.) And they wish for more and more students from
across India to take the initiative and design, encode, and create indian
language solutions under free software to create a 'digital revolution' in
indian software development that bridges the digital divide in the country.
for those interested, the email ids of the two students is
[EMAIL PROTECTED] please do not respond directly to me, i have no
further information to share. contact avneesh and shivaas directly.
LL
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