लेखन

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...

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...

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?]