HI,

On 7/23/11, Vinod Kumar <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear Free and Open Developers,
>
> I looked at the Telugu OpenType font tables in the Perfect shaping
> presentation of Shri Arjuna Rao Chavala.

My presentation link is given below
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeAsia/2011Summit/Slides?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=Towards+Perfect+Indic+Rendering+on+Gnome+By+Arjuna+Rao+Chavala.pdf

The presence of feature flags
> indicates that Opentype is used as a Digital font. This is the approach
> promoted by Microsoft Typography.
Yes


 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.
>
Digital font also has context sensitive substitutions, in my
understanding. Of course, your approach seems to imply a simple
implementation.

> 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.
>

Thanks for sharing.


> 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.
>
Currently, most development work  on indic pango is being contributed
by Behdad.  If the existing fonts can work without and a sample
implementation can be done that integrates with Pango or QT,  your
proposal can  gain traction.

> 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.
>
Hope this will  also help  in transforming CDAC in releasing font
related resources under  public domain/Copyleft  license  modes

> 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).

In the rendering space, free software efforts were aimed at improving
the rendering of languages and websites in a compatible way with
Microsoft.

If you are able to release your work under copy left license and lead
the initiative to implement  a pango library,  your proposal can get
much traction.

Best wishes

Cheers
Arjun

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