Thanks for your generous feedbacks. Improved Implementation details:
I will be implementing this application for the Devanagri script. To implement the testing application what I propose to do is, first of all set standards or rule-sets ie what to search for in any Devanagri script. There exists a current application called fontQA but that runs only inside FontLabs, which is not freely available, therefore it is very difficult to try, modify and test it. Therefore I plan to make a script to start with based on the Font Forge framework. The idea of the script, would be extract the data from the font in the following fashion: We would be analysing the font's shaping engine algorithm, as to how it actually parses the input from the user into glyphs by using the GPOS & GSUB methods, to achieve this we can use a standard text similar to “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” which uses the characteristic properties unique to the type of font. Standard properties of a font can't be altered by the developer, while the dynamic properties are those which can be modified at developer's will. I think the best way to test fonts based on these properties in the script would be from *classes*, one for standard properties and the other for dynamic properties, with appropriate methods built inside to check for the properties and their values. Retrieving static properties would be easy, since most of them would be numerical values like font weight, point size etc. To check for the dynamic properties, one needs to look at when and how the actual shaping of the glyph takes place after the glyph buffer for the text has been created. When a rendering engine handles a chunk of text (usually a syllable), the processing is divided into a set of predefined “features”, which are “applied” one after the other in a standardized way. What differentiates one font from the other in the manner in which these “features” are applied. We could implement this by making methods inside the class to check for these. How one must go about making these methods depends largely on the rendering engine used (I would be using Pango for my case) and the parameters which exhibit each instance of applying these features. These “features” for Devanagri script are well described for the Uniscribe, W3C specifications! The points kept in mind would be the OpenType specifications for the script, and will have scope for addition. These are again specified, at the unicode standards. Is the proposal draft, ok ? I have omitted mentioning the Unicode standards and the OpenType specifications as they are pretty long. Should I copy paste it into my proposal ? Would that make it more good ? Cheers!
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