RE: [Freebangfont-devel] plan to create an unified layout table

[Robin Upton]

> On 31 Jan 2003, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:
>
> > ...hehe - M$ Office 97 in Win XP supports Bangla with our fonts ;-)
>
> That's great news... but I don't use M$ :P
>
> > We need to get some good looking glyphs....
>
> Actually I would like to skip on *good looking glyphs* for now. The reason
> I am intrested to create this flow is so that people can start creating
> fonts with good looking glyphs and not worry about the layout table. I am
> sure there are enough people out there who can create fancy glyphs, but
> IMHO the major reason we don't see many OpenType fonts is because most of
> the people are not clear about the whole layout table issue.
>

I agree - the important thing is to establish a standard that is technically
up to the job. Artwork can come later.

> > Yep - I usually follow k kh g gh... for the consonants and kk , kt, etc
> > for the conjuncts
>
> well, would you mind creating a list only for the vowels and consonants?
> And for conjuncts I would recommend using a '_' in between, other wise it
> may become difficult to understand. For example, if we say n = donton no
> and nn = murdhano no, then what will 'nnn' mean? 'n_nn' or 'nn_n' will
> make it clear.
>

Reserving '_' as a separator character seems like a pretty sensible idea.
Is it important that the names are easily human readable? Or human typeable?
Will they be on show or buried in the guts of a program that people use but
don't go near if they can help it?

> > Yep - but do they handle positioning??
> > Positioning has to be there for hrasha-u and related things.
> > Otherwise, you need newer glyphs
>
> In the OpenType font, all the tables (GSUB, GPOS, etc.) are stored
> separately with glyph indices. So as long as the new font has the same
> number of glyphs in the same order as the master, all we need to do is:
>
> - dump out all the GPOS, GSUB, and other tables from the master font, and
> - merge them into the new font.
>
> This will take care of everything. Matter of fact, if the creater of the
> new font does not want to put all the glyphs, s/he can just leave them
> blank (but set the name).
>
> Does this make sense?
>

I think so. Is it important to _anticipate_ all the glyphs people might
ever want in a bangla font - obsolete Bangla signs, regional variants,
miswritings, alternative character forms etc.  This might be pretty tricky
- I've looked in detail at quite a few different Bangla TTFs and have had
a lot of surprises.

Don't underestimate the difficulty of coordinating this, Taneem. However,
it seems feasible to me and is possibly worth it as a good means to an end
of automating Bangla OTFs. If you're prepared to do a 'unicode style'
allocation of names and numbers to Bangla Glyphs then go ahead - a unified
layout table seems like common sense. Do be prepared to revise and update
it, though.

Robin Upton
Altruists International
www.altruists.org