Dear Free and Open Developers,
I looked at the Telugu OpenType font tables in the Perfect shaping
presentation of Shri Arjuna Rao Chavala. The presence of feature flags
indicates that Opentype is used as a Digital font. This is the approach
promoted by Microsoft Typography. A simpler and elegant approach is to use
the OpenType font as an Intelligent font- Intelligent in the sense of
ISO/IEC 15285 Technical report.
A Digital font is one whose shapes can be changed, size, boldness, italics
etc by flags or parameters embedded into the input text by a human directly
or through style sheets.
An Intelligent font has context sensitive substitutions that allow an input
string (the logical sequence of characters ) to be transformed to an output
string of glyph ids according to a grammar.
This is not a speculation or a theory. The approach has been implemented
into the IndiX-2 software (Live CD, library, tools) and into the Raghu
series of IndiX-2 fonts.
A 4 page paper (google docs link inlined) describes the distinction between
using OpenType font as a Digital font or as an Intelligent font.
Vinod Kumar, "Standards for visual syllables for Indic scripts",
ViswaBharat@TDIL, Proceedings on World Wide Web: Technology, Standards and
Internationalization, 6-7 May 2010, New Delhi, Special Issue, Vol. 35-36,
pp. 455-459.
Also inlined is link to a 13 slide presentation that was slated to be given
at the w3c conf.
The Free Developers should ponder over why a scheme that complicates
software, fonts, and processing should still be pursued in a fresh
development effort. As the IndiX-II developer, I can assure you that shaping
Indic text with the "OpenType as Intelligent font" will lead to significant
improvement in the Indic rendering scene.
I try to get the backing of C-DAC and DIT firmly behind this approach.
C-DAC now has a new Director General, Prof. Rajat Moona from IIT Kanpur.
With Prof Rajat Moona at the helm at C-DAC, the IndiX-2 recommendations are
likely to be understood better, and we may push for it to be adopted as
Indian, Unicode, and Indic Open Font standards.
I earnestly implore the Free and Open developers to understand the
difference between the two approaches and devote portion of their effort
into implementing the simpler approach. This could lead to, not only Indic
shaping improvements, but also affect all complex script processing (Arabic
for example). It could also end up with Microsoft adopting the Intelligent
font scheme for complex script processing instead of the other way. When
confronted with the IndiX-2 scheme, the people from Microsoft Typography
used to tell me that everyone follows the Microsoft Typography standards.
(Apple has its own AAT and IndiX-II did not follow Microsoft, but we were no
match for the wolf and the Free Software developers who followed, and still
follow, the wolf without thinking).
vissylw3c.pdf -
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B1xwhQ_rnCuzMWZkMDUwY2QtYTNhZC00MGQ2LThhMmQtMGQ1ZmM5NjQzNzdl&hl=en_US
openFontw3cconfmay2010.pdf -
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0B1xwhQ_rnCuzNjJjYzJhNjMtMzI4ZS00NmY3LTg1YmYtMzUzYTJjODliMjM2&hl=en_US
Cheers,
vinod kumar
---
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