Re: Free Unicode Indic (Was: Sick HTML)

From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@dircon.co.uk)
Date: Thu Apr 20 2000 - 13:37:49 EDT


Antoine Leca <Antoine.Leca@renault.fr> wrote:

> So we end up with te problem of the fonts. Designing good fonts is not
> an easy task (I know what I say), then hand hinting is mandatory if
> you want to stay readable on screen (another full-time job), and there
> is always the problem of piracy, so at the end the result is that free
> fonts are more often crappy than beautiful. If you constraint the field
> by asking for fonts for a specific scripts, it is quite normal in my
> eyes that the result of your quest appears empty.

> BUT converting an already designed Indic font for the Indic OpenType
> format is NOT a difficult task (in particular with the soon-to-be-
> released Visual OpenType Layout Tool from Microsoft). An moderately
> complex font should be converted in less than one day by a (skilled)
> enginneer, I think.

Yes - though for font developers wishing to convert their Indic (and other)
fonts to OpenType a late beta version of Microsoft's Visual Open Type Layout
Tool (VOLT) is *already* available, basically for the asking - see:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/volt/default.htm and their
document "Creating and supporting OpenType fonts for Indic scripts" is at:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/indicot/default.htm

A sample Devanagari font is available with VOLT and this provides a very useful
template for the OT table structure and information in a Devanagari font. Even
with all this, if your own font supported many ligatures, I suspect it would
take more than a day to convert.

For those who want to convert their Type1 outline fonts to OT, information on
how to obtain Adobe's OpenType Font Developer's kit is available at:
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/opentypefdk.html

- Chris



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