लेखन

A lot of Android devices, platforms and apps have several issues regarding rendering of non-English text especially that of Indic text. Though many of them claim to support various Indic and other languages, it usually either means that they have a font for that language included or they have some of the native apps supporting all these languages. But this does not mean all the app will be able to render the non-English text properly. This usually happens for one of the following problem being present: 1. No fonts added in the device (or the native android system) 2. Fonts are not accessible by the third party application 3. App has its own Unicode font, but the native android system does not support text layout rendering for the language 4. App has the font and the android system also supports the language, but the sdk for the particular platform does not have widgets integrated with the complex text rendering features. This problem gave birth to the idea of developing...

Most android devices come with set of fonts already installed for all the general purpose use with variety of styles and various languages. There is also something called 'fallback' font which ensures that in case a required font is not available, the system falls back to this font with wide range of characters and more generic style to display the text. But sometimes, you really want to use that specific font which is not there on the device or you just 'have' to use a some non-english font because the system by default does not have the font for the language you wish to use. Though upfront it looks like a simple task of installing the font, unfortunately android does not yet provide a simple way of doing it in user space. It is possible for an application to provide a custom font and use it within the application, but that's not really installing it on the device, its applicable only within the app. Recently while working with some Indic languages on androi...

The Tamil Nadu state government in its IT policies declared two important points: 1. Unicode would be accepted as a standard for encoding Tamil 2. Tamil glossaries would be made available through Wiktionary I think this is a really good step in a state where there has been a lot of fight and controversy over the encoding standard. As far the glossaries are concerned, Governments should always ensure the public accessibility of the digital resources being created in their institutes, be it glossaries, corpora, fonts or research papers. Just hoping that these stated objectives would be achieved in a timely manner. Read more at: http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/04/stories/2010050454560400.htm

It seems like there is some problem with comment posting on Anivar's blog . So I decide to put my reply as a separate blog post. Here it goes: Few factual corrections and comments: 1. About the pango bug 357790 and the patch on it: The patch on this bug is a mere clean up version of the patch on bug 121672 which was originally created by LingNing. This was also based on the inputs given by Ani about the grammar of 0d30 and 0d31 which was later resolved (to 0d30 only) through discussions with smc. Point is not to transfer the responsibility, but to acknowledge that pango genuinely has a problem that it does not behave the way Uniscribe does. Another problem in this case is that, Uniscribe bahavior has changed from its version in XP to Vista and we are yet to fix this bug completely. Anyway, my patch was reverted one year back (see Comment #32 on bug 357790 ). Ever since then I have urged on concentrating on the original issue which I still continue to. And Lohit was agreed to b...

First: _Some updates on Lohit Malayalam fonts_ Recently, there has been a huge agitation by Malayalam community about the bugs in the f9 final version of lohit fonts. You can get a glimpse of it here . Most of these were either last minute hickups or not reported at all until then. But whatever it was, the final product could not be buggy. So, within a short span of time, all these bugs ( #444559 , #444561 , #444563 ) were fixed for Lohit and tagged into for the f9 final. So the version in fedora and latest upstream, lohit-2.2.1 is free of all these bugs. Malayalam users would be able to find the fixes in the following screenshot. Second: _Some comments on the events going around_ After working for so many years on so many languages for so many different tools and applications, sometimes for some organizations, sometimes just out of passion, I (or should I say we, the language computing guys) have developed this immense love for all the languages of India. They are all rich in their he...

This weekend got contributed for the first Indic Mashup workshop. The idea initiated by Karunakar finally took shape inside Red Hat premises at Pune. The participants were expected to come from various language communities. So most of the Red Hat's Localization team appeared on a Sunday morning. It would have been great if more linguists and i18n contributors around Pune and Mumbai would have participated. But except Karunakar and Localization team, the only linguist present was Ravi Pandey who is a font designer and Marathi, Sanskrit expert. Still the crowd of 13 and the issues were good enough to discuss and work upon for 10 to 5 schedule. Various issues from keyboard layout to collation tables, a lot got discussed. I thought related bug reports could also have been filed at appropriate places, but that might need more focussed workshops in near future. Now we are clear what issues are there and what can be done for them. I think this is a very good achievement for now. So far,...

The long awaited Samyak fonts are finally in Fedora . Being one of the major initial projects in my career, Samyak will always remain close to the heart. Thanks to Pravin for packaging them very well in accordance to the font SIG's guidelines and thanks to Parag for reviewing it. Thanks to Sandeep Shedmake as well for driving this in. His contributions for licensing/copyright text correction and few other bug fixes really made it happen. I had plans to put them in fedora's last two releases as well, but something else always kept it away from priority. Somebody must have said, 'never forget to thank yourself'. So here I am, patting my own shoulder for being the initiator of the design for these fonts. One more reason to fall in love for this, the name ' Samyak ', given by me, still remains a source of inspiration and attachment. Finally how can I forget Dr. Nagarjuna G., who has been the initiator and the guiding force behind the entire project. A special tha...

Assuming you are using a Gnu/Linux box with input methods(mostly scim) available to input many of the Indic scripts and have Lohit fonts installed. Open gedit and start typing anything. Now keep changing the keyboard layout to write something in each language say Marathi, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Tamil and so on. Don't worry if you don't know the languages, just type garbage. You will notice that most of the scripts supported by Lohit fonts are more or less scaled to each other. Now try typing Telugu. Still the size is scaled? Yes, they look matched in size. But did you notice the hight of that cursor? This is an issue with Telugu that even though the font on average looks scaled properly, the cursor size is not. And thus the spacing between two lines is also unexpectedly large. Of course you can reduce the size of the cursor by reducing font size, but it still remains out of proportion to the glyph sizes and thus giving ugly line spacing. It appears that the cursor size is determin...

So finally, I am giving out this long awaited draft: http://tinyurl.com/34yckl It addresses some of the OpenType, Unicode and fonts related issues. Many of the issues discussed here, have been the source of conflicts, especially for ml_IN. Thus it was an utter need to provide a detailed analysis like this. I hope the illustrations made there provide some common guidelines. There is certainly a scope for improvement. I would like to hear from various communities if they want some of the other left out issues to be also addressed. The draft is open for discussion and feedback.

After advocating font licenses to be other than GPL, I had to review the license of the self maintained Samyak font. Thus the discussion is on at samyak-users list. If you think there is really something about GPL with 'font exception' and OFL then please join the list and start commenting. The other list (samyak-devel) is not functioning an I'm trying to get it up. Should be ok within couple of days. Till then the general purpose IRC channel #samyak on freenode.net would be a good place to find developers and do some quick chats.

It was a lazy Saturday and I spent a lot of time playing around with the layout of this blog on a frustratingly slow home wifi connection until I got settled into this fairly well structured design. Next I kept wondering how to categorize the posts, when I finally looked into a proper source i.e. Help section on blogger itself. Should I have started posting, I would have noticed the labels field. Anyways, its a Sunday early dawn and I am still up, not cared to get up in morning. Earlier today(or should I say the last day now) the bandwidth played bad on me. My email client kept complaining about mail deliveries and still I got acks for few of the mails. Bearing all the trouble I still managed to reply on the Lohit fonts issue. Now going back to relax to a movie , goodnight everyone. [LC: not again.. I am struggling to publish even this post.. is someone from reliance broadband reading this?]