Re: [Freefont-bugs] sinhala

[Primoz PETERLIN]

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Hello,

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, Noah Levitt wrote:

> I discovered that the Sinhala fonts here
> http://www.metta.lk/fonts/ are GPL. Click "Download font
> from This Server". the .exe is just a zip archive; you can
> "unzip" it.

Excellent, thank you for this information!

> They are not encoded correctly, of course. The sinhala
> characters are mapped onto ascii and latin1 code points.
> Using pfaedit, I copied and pasted glyphs from tipita1a.ttf
> into FreeSans at the correct code points. I'm attaching a
> log of what I put where and some other information.

I don't know Sinhala, so I am not of any help here. I do believe though
that a lousy Sinhala is better than no Sinhala at all, so with your
permission, I will just upload what we have, and can correct later if some
native Sri Lankan points to us where we are wrong. If we are wrong at all. :)

> Unfortunately, the glyphs got screwed up somewhat. I don't
> know why. :-( I didn't see this until I had closed and
> reopened FreeSans.sfd in pfaedit. I don't know anything
> about font editing or pfaedit, so I don't know how to fix it
> or do it right.

I noticed that about every other glyph has some control point waaaay off.
I tried to correct those, and have just now uploaded an updated version to
the CVS archive.

> Attaching a patch. I don't expect it to be applied, since
> the glyphs are messed up, but hopefully someone will look at
> it and have some advice or be able to do something with it.
>  [patch is not attached; it is at
>   http://www.columbia.edu/~nlevitt/tmp/sinhala.diff]

The glyphs themselves look a bit dirty - they have at least twice as much
control points as they need have - so at some later point one might want
to tidy them up a bit. It doesn't affect the output, only the efficiency
or size of the font, so this is not on the top of the priority list.

As they are rather heavily modulated (thin/thick strokes), I think they
would also better fit to the Free Serif typeface. I plan to play with this
later.

Anyway, thank you very much for your contribution!

With kind regards,
Primoz Peterlin

- --
Primož Peterlin,   Inštitut za biofiziko, Med. fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani
Lipičeva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija.  address@hidden
Tel +386-1-5437632, fax +386-1-4315127,  http://biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si/~peterlin/
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