hi GK, thanks for your response, and for forwarding my mailing to fred in goa. quick responses to your comments:
> I appreciate the vision & objective, but I am afraid if the goal of > contest is to have good quality opentype fonts, then contest would > come short of it as font design needs an artistic hand , knowledge of > script/language . A more appropriate objective of contest could be > have contestants design a basic font ( lets say just the Unicode > ranges ). agreed that font design and typography is a multi-disciplinary approach with strong sense of aesthetics and coding. *but* its a pity nothing is even mentioned about this important aspect of computing in education, ever! thus the contest. the reason i wish to have the fonts and source files gpl-ed, is 'cause the constant refinement principle can kick-in. i expect the start to be beautifully imperfect. should i wish or hanker for perfection at the contest, no indian font design will ever take place, and all the interested and curious would run away. should it start, and people get to appreciate its grandeur and impact, i assume more and more people will get involved, and build it up from scratch into a tidal wave. > > Recently one company Cyberscape multimedia ( Akruti ) made available > set of fonts under GNU GPL. > See http://www.akruti.com/freedom/ . [snip] yup! am aware of this. when i started planning the contest, this news hadn't happened. i feel indian language coding needs a gigantic amount of work, in infinite dimensions, and we haven't even scratched the surface, all under gpl so that all end users have the freedoms that it deserves for use: i) good quality unicode+otf fonts. 2) variety of fonts for different purposes. 3) indian language input engines, unicode-savvy, for mac, win, linux, unix, psion, symbian, etc. 4) unicode-based indian language dictionaries 5) indian language OCR with 95% or higher accuracy. 6) indian language text to speech, with the correct phonetics of the bigger range of sounds and syllables. 7) indian language speech to text. 8) indian language handwriting recognition 9) indian language translation tools within indian languages, as well as with other languages. 10) i also dream of a new kind of input device, beyond the mouse, the keyboard, stylus pen, or microphone, that would be far more appropriate for indian languages. something perhaps that would have ripple effects and be used for all languages. think about it, the keyboard is the world's most infamous device designed to speed input down, rather than up. (read its historical legacy at ibm). and its so made-for-western alphabets and languages. 11) indian language grammar, style, checker. this would be awesome. it could perhaps make our languages much more convenient and easier to use, and a customised style engine could perhaps refine its use, much like what premchand and rabindranath tagore and other leading lights did to hindi and bengali. if tagore could win a nobel prize, it shows that the languages are rich and refined, we haven't found anyone to wield it with the same power and grace, yet. <<all this IMHO>>. > > > logistix: > > > > 2) the font format must be opentype font. see opentype.org for more > > info. > > Not yet, it rightnow only works on Windoz 2K & XP, and with Indix & > Pango on Linux well, otf fonts work under win98, winme, etc using the free-cost adobe type manager utility from adobe. mac supports otf natively. i am quite confident freetype and other font rasterizing engines will support otf quite soon. 'tis a matter of time. do note that otf font specifications have been out circa 1998. > > 4) an exhaustive amount of reference and research material on type, > > type encoding, type design, type file formats, unicode, indian > > language encoding, etc. has bee compiled and made available to the > > schools on a cd. you are free to copy and further distribute this > > cd, for your own reference and research. this reference includes the > > unicode tables for indian languages, the INSCRIPT layout of the > > keyboard for indian languages, and tonnes of other essential stuff. > > Has this CD been already made or in making ? yes, this is my own personal research. done over quite some time. will drop a copy of this at raj's so others may pick it up if they wish. > > > Hinting of font is bigger task than doing the font itself. i agree. but if a student or a contestant is bright enough to figure this out, and / or attempt it to some extent, naturally some recognition is in order. the contest, at the juncture of the inter-school competition, is merely to ignite the minds of indians towards the dire need for digital development of our own needs in india. i feel really sorry, disappointed, and disillusioned, when i note the perhaps sub-conscious approach of the govt. and the media, that our indian language coding solutions will be made available thru commercial licensing to us, by powerful, monopolistic MNC companies, or from pockets of individuals, entrepreneurs, or govt. agencies, often working in collision with one another. how about a tide that moves in the affairs of indians? linuxlingam
