[Freebangfont-devel] Re: +AFs-Freebangfont-devel+AF0- RE: FREE Bangla Software Avro Keyboard - NewVersion Available

[jn]

Well, that means I am not getting the problem solved very quickly. Hence,
some other developers (one of them is Mr. Omi Azad, developer of Sagar) told
me that they will be able to release some *new* fonts at the end of this
month.

I shall update my site then with license information and updated
acknowledgement. Thanks for spending your valuable time in replying my
mails.

Regards,
Mehdi Hasan.
WEB: www.omicronlab.com
Avro Keyboard: http://www.omicronlab.com/avrokeyboard/

PS. I think you should write some good tutorials about creating open type
fonts on your site, I know some people who are interested to develop open
type fonts but don't know where to get started.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Deepayan Sarkar" <address@hidden>
To: <address@hidden>
Cc: "Bangla-Font" <address@hidden>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 8:21 PM
Subject: Re: [Freebangfont-devel] RE: FREE Bangla Software Avro Keyboard -
NewVersion Available


> On Friday 28 February 2003 19:10, address@hidden wrote:
> > Dear Deepayan,
> >
> > In using Likhan, when I type ta+halant, it immediately create the
> > khandatta. However, after that, typing ZWJ doesn't cause any problem.
> > But the developer didn't use exactly ta+halant+ZWJ to create khandatta.
>
> It's not exactly that simple. I don't know how much you know about
opentype,
> but there's a concept of half forms and halanta forms of all consonants.
When
> unicode was designed, they basically didn't think about khanda ta, and
later
> when people asked they just said to use the half form of ta as khanda ta
> (which means that the font should contain the khanda ta glyph where it
should
> have contained the half form of ta). So in a 'correct' font, you should
see
> see khanda ta wherever the half form was supposed to be used.
>
> This by itself is not enough for proper rendering. Unicode makes a
> recommendation of using ta + halanta + ZWJ, which is also not enough (try
> writing the the word 'utkoch').
>
> Currently the best you can do is ta + halanta + ZWJ + ZWNJ (this is also
> microsoft approved). Andy has just submitted a very well thought out
proposal
> to the unicode list, and there's always the faint chance that it would be
> acted upon, in which case this would change drastically again.
>
> The point is, development on this is far from over, and you should not
make it
> completely hardcoded in your software. In particular, you should have a
way
> to change from one encoding to another, that may be useful in the long
run.
>
> > Sagar is only using ta+halant to make khandatta.
> >
> > This issue is important because I have to make it hardcoded in my
> > software. Here, some are working with ta+halant, rest are ta+halant+ZWJ.
> > This is really causing problem in typing and searching also. Just think
in
> > this version, as most fonts are using ta+halant, I have hardcoded it to
> > make khandatta. In the next version, if I make ta+halant+ZWJ to create
> > khandatta, users will face problem in the "search and replace" type
> > operations. Again, if the fonts are updated, they will see that in their
> > documents, all khandatta has been changed to foolish ta+halant.
> > This is demolishing the Goodwill of both FBF and Avro Keyboard.
>
> Well, you will have to accept the fact that khanda ta hasn't been
standardized
> yet. I have a script that converts any input file from one khanda ta
encoding
> to another. Maybe you should have something similar.
>
> > Sources are available with the fonts. If the original developers are
> > inactive, why others are not taking care of this issue. This should be a
> > ten minutes work for you.
>
> Actually, it isn't a 10 minute job. The original developer did say at some
> point that he was looking at it. We did try to make an interim release,
but
> we don't have access to any proprietary font editor (and they don't run on
> Linux anyway), and there were some odd problems with Pfaedit. I'll take a
> look again when I have time.
>
>
>
>