Statement of purpose:

The aim of this paper is to record the practical problems of developing Unicode fonts for various Indic Languages in general and Telugu Language in particular and provide solutions with Knowledge sharing initiatives. Eversince Unicode came into existence, various individuals and organizations have been developing fonts for various Indic languages and they have been facing many practical problems and dilemmas. However, there is no attempt to chronicle them and share them with fellow developers in order to find out solutions. I would like share some of my practical problems/dilemmas in developing Telugu Unicode Fonts. (For example, what are the practical problems/limitations of some of the popular Font making tools in creating Indic Fonts, especially Telugu fonts? What are the problems/limitations imposed by the Operating Systems (Solaris,Linux, Win2000 and XP) and their implementations of Unicode Standard? There will also be a brief comparative analysis of various features availabe in Fontographer, Font creater Program and AsiaFont Studio.

The paper also emphasises the need for creating:
(a) a common indic block to accommodate some common characters/musical symbols
(b) a standard transliteration system
(c) an open source library of input utilities and other text processing utilities.

Paper description:

This is going to be a technical paper recording the practical problems in developing aesthetically appealing Telugu Unicode Fonts without compromising the functional (sorting/indexing etc,) requirements. Some simple and cost-efficient solutions will also be outlined in this. The paper will also ephasize the need for creating/forming a common Open Source Forum to solve some of the problems associated with the developing of Unicode Fonts.

Conclusions:

By forming a forum and sharing the problems/dilemmas/ and tips and tricks with the fellow developers we can solve so many problems and simplify the task of creating unicode fonts.