[Freebangfont-devel] RFC: design of bengali opentype font

[Deepayan Sarkar]

This is an RFC for the design of a proposed template font for the Free
Bangla Font project (the idea being that this would be as complete as
possible in terms of coverage, so that others can easily create new
fonts by simply replacing these glyphs by their own glyphs, with no or
very little tweaking of the opentype stuff).


See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/bengalot/default.htm
for microsoft's thoughts on bengali opentype fonts



1. Should we have glyphs for ASCII and Latin-1 ? Punctuation marks ?

   - We have to deal with lots of unnecessary glyphs
   + If we don't, we would only be able to use the fonts in software 
     that has a font fallback mechanism, and even then there's no 
     guarantee that the combination would look good

2. List of juktakshars

   We need to decide what would constitute 'complete coverage'. The
   best we have at this point is the file juktolist.txt that comes
   with Lekho. Alternatives ?

3. Akhands

   Microsoft mentions something called akhands which I don't really
   understand the need for. Should we have akhands ? If so, which ? 
   (My preference would be to drop them altogether.)

4. Naming conventions

   We need to be careful with this as this will not be easily changed
   in future. 

   This has 2 parts to it, first how to name the Unicode codepoints,
   and second, how to name the combinations.

   For the unicode points, here's an initial suggestion (in unicode order):

   #####################################
   chandrabindu
   anusvara
   bisarga

   a aa i ii u uu ri li e ai o au

   ka kha ga gha nga
   cha chha ja jha nya
   Ta Tha Da Dha Na
   ta tha da dha na
   pa pha ba bha ma
   ya ra la
   sha Sha sa ha

   nukta

   aakaar
   ikaar
   iikaar
   ukaar
   uukaar
   rikaar
   rrikaar
   ekaar
   aikaar
   okaar
   aukaar

   hasanta
   auMark (shouldn't be needed anywhere)

   Ra
   Rha
   Ya

   rri
   lli
   likaar
   llikaar

   shunya
   ek
   dui
   tin
   chaar
   paanch
   chhoi
   saat
   aat
   noi

   asamiba
   asamira   
   (anyone know appropriate names for these ?)

   takamark
   takasign    (?)
   currency1
   currency2
   currency3
   currency4
   currency1less
   currency16
   isshar

   #######################################

   Proposed rules for combining names:

   all combinations should be separated by an underscore (_).
   Consonants, unless they are the last component of a combination,
   should have their trailing 'a' stripped. 

   e.g.

   k_Sha
   k_Sh_Na
   n_ya
   d_ukaar
   n_d_ukaar
   h_rikaar

   Half forms should be called 

   half_ka
   half_kha  etc

   nukta forms should be kalled

   k_nukta
   kh_nukta  etc

   halant forms should be called

   k_hasanta
   kh_hasanta etc

5. Any other aspects I have missed ?



- Deepayan