Thursday, December 26, 2013

Malayalam moderns script and Lohit Mayalam

As you know we started working on Lohit Mayalam this month under the lohit2 project with planning number of improvement from standards, efficiency and effectiveness purpose. [1]

Sneha in between blogged regarding how we started working on Lohit Malayalam. [2]

After getting initial basic work done we got stuck on standard perspective. How the ligatures should be and what is attestation for same.

Earlier Lohit Malayalam was behaving bit different, cross checked with some modern script Malayalam fonts around like NotoSans, RaghuMalayalam. Gone through utrrs but still attestation was lacking.

Finally after bit searching remembered Govt. of India has Vishwabharat(विश्वभारत) [3] series where they write regarding each script of India.

 And we got good documentation for Malayalam modern orthography. We will refer to this and cross check with things around before the Alpha release of lohit-malayalam.




1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/12/lohit2-lohit-malayalam-development-plans.html
2. http://snehakore.blogspot.in/2013/12/the-way-we-proceed-with-malayalam.html
3. http://tdil.mit.gov.in/pdf/Vishwabharat/tdil-april-2002.zip

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Lohit2: Lohit Malayalam development plans

    I am sure now everyone should be happy with Lohit Devanagari and Lohit
Gujarati releases. While looking back i see we have achieved objectives
planned [1] during the start of project. Its time to move towards other
scripts. Though Bengali, Gurumukhi, Tamil looks low hanging fruits we
want to fix bit more challenging scripts as well.

    We started thinking on what we can do in Lohit Malayalam in last
month. After couple of weeks of analyisis we found there is good scope
for improvement in Lohit Malayalam.

    Basic improvements as we done in Devanagari and Gujarati
    1. Following AGL. [2]
    2. Supporting points provided in Unicode chapter 9 for Malayalam script.
    3. Feature file separate for flexibility and reusability.
    4. Complete cleanup of existing Open type tables
    5. Supporting both "mlym" and "mlm2" open type specifications.
    6. Thorough testing with Harfbuzz and Uniscribe (WinXp, W7 and W8)

    Other fonts specific improvement.
    7. Presently Malayalam font has 281 shapes out of that we figure out
71 (+5/6) shapes are irrelevant. We can achieve these shapes with glyph
positioning and intelligent glyph substitution rules without affecting
fonts aesthetics and quality.
    8. We have some pending bugs on bugzilla [3] as well

    As we planned earlier making Lohit fonts most efficient and
effective is our primary objective. [1]

    Bit ambitious to say right now but i want make Lohit as a lightest
Malayalam modern script fonts.

    Sneha has already started working on lohit2 [4] git repo for
Malayalam font development.

   If you are looking any other suggestions or improvement in Lohit,
feel free to propose here.
 

1.
http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. https://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/
3.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&classification=Fedora&component=lohit-malayalam-fonts&list_id=2010178&product=Fedora&query_format=advanced
4. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Points on Open source language summit 2013 second day

As my first tweet in the morning said, this is lohitise and ibus-typing-booster day
 we indeed had great day around this project.

Lohit-ising fonts:

Demonstrated lohit-ise concept with Samyak Devanagari fonts due to time restriction we only modified the single combination of Samyak Devanagari but i hope that was sufficient for understanding concept.

I hope Sneha [1] will do further blogging with nice images on how we actually done this demonstration. Steps are already available on my earlier blog.[2]

Looking forward this to make good impact on some of the available fonts around. But i think still people will take time understanding usefulness of this. So we need to provide clear details on what things got improved and how it will help in longterm after lohit-ising fonts.

Ibus typing booster [3]
This project is around now for 2+ years and number of feature developed considering users requirement.
Anish started nicely with the need behind this project with me presenting on feature of typing booster.

Thanks a lot to Vasudev again for trying installing ibus-typing-booster on Debian. I am hoping he liked the project and will give some more inputs and contribute more.

I tried last two time test day of itb and this is first time when all participants appreciated project and said the need of more intense testing of this may be for couple of hours. This is really motivating.

I am setting up project page for it.

1. http://snehakore.blogspot.in/
2. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/11/how-to-lohit-ise-open-type-fonts-not.html
3. https://fedorahosted.org/ibus-typing-booster

How to Lohit-ise open type fonts not updated or new development

These are steps we followed in session for lohitising open type fonts.

1. git clone https://github.com/pravins/lohit
2. cd (devanagari or malayalam etc as per your fonts script requirement)
3. cp "yourfont.ttf" .
4. yourfont.ttf open with fontforge and save as a yourfont.sfd
5. open yourfonts .sfd and update glyphs names as per lohit fonts.
6. python ../scripts/apply_featurefile.py yourfont.sfd Lohit-.fea  

   Things to note here apply_featurefile.py only import gsub of lohit project, it will keep gpos tables intact.

There are number of benefits of lohitising open type fonts, i will write separate blog on it with proper implementation example.

Monday, November 18, 2013

First day of language summit and things achieved.

It was good day considering the plans i did before the start of summit 2013. [1]
Lohit2 Development session:
  •  Started with explaining basic idea behind Lohit2 project.
  • Next we had excellent discussion again on Adobe Glyph Names. I am sure i made concept very clear but still there are some plus and minuses with AGL. In the next conference around Typography i am surely would love to talk in details regarding it.
  • Aravinda [2] explained his blog wrote on lohit2 kannada and gubbi and navilu font development. 
    • I loved his idea for having script for generating AGL based names from user friendly name. 
    • In long term if we can have such script useful for building .sfd to .ttf and automatically all fonts build with fontforge will become AGL compliant.
  • Sneha explained on steps followed to develop Devanagaria ang Gujarati. These steps are very helpful as we are going to follow same for all other script fonts. I hope sneha would like to blog about same with more details.
  • Santhosh exaplined Gsoc project for automatically testing fonts rendering. 
    • Earlier i had different perspective on this project. Since We are already following test suite in Harfbuzz developed by Behdad.
    • Here first step is different. i.e. font developer suppose to create correct combination standard file. Then we will pass unicode text to hb-shape and compate o/p with out standard file.
    • This project is font specific on the other hand Harfbuzz is not font specific but assumes fonts work perfect on Uniscribe (This assumption is correct since font used for testing were validated and heavily tested on Uniscribe)
  • Done some plans for future development and done.
  • I liked some of the attendees shown interest for how they can resuse Lohit2 open type table. going to explain it in tomorrow session with implementing concept on Samyak fonts, so stay tuned :)
Font packaging session:
This session was good, as i think first time Fedora and Debian package were in front and discussing how we can improve. It was good to have me, Parag, Karthik and VasudevK here.

Thanks VasudevK [8] for creating track request [3] for packing ibus-typing-booster in Debain. I am sure after learning about this project more Debian users will request for having itb in Debian.

As per planned me and Parag packaged SakalMarathi [4], tharlon-fonts[5], phetsarath-fonts [6], tuladha-jejeg-fonts [7]

  Looking forward to attend Behdad's session on Harfbuzz via Google Hangout.
 

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/11/things-i-am-expecting-from-open-source.html
2. https://aravindavk.in/blog/improving-kannada-fonts/
3. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=729851
4. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031569
5. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031587
6. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031588
7. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031603
8. https://twitter.com/copyninja_

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Things i am expecting from the open source lang summit 2013

Hi,

  Almost start of the open source lang summit 2013. I think this is good time to list down things i am expecting from this summit.

  If you had chance to gone through my earlier blog [1] on the sprints plan for this summit, you might be already know the activities i was planning.

  Happy that all my sprint plans are got accepted and excited to work on it.

Fonts

Day 2
  1. (Sprint 1 )
- Lohit2
    - Hacking Telugu and Kannada Open type table
Telugu does not looks possible but i am optimistic for Lohit Kannada2, lets see if we can have at least alpha ready...

    - Testing of Released Devanagari and Gujarati
Devanagari Beta is out last week and Gujarati Alpha is yesterday itself. Hoping we will have some more thorough testing for same.

Day 2
(Sprint 2 )
Just idea presently on how we can use lohit2 reusable tables in long run
- Lohit-ise (Will give small 10min presentation on this)
    - Work on Devanagari and Gujarati fonts

   First of all i need to explain the concept clearly. Once that is done and there will be no doubts, we will try to implement it on Samyak fonts and if contributors are interested will help to implement it on other fonts.

Day 1
(Sprint 3 )
Time to update font packages in major OS distribution. One can learn packaging through this sprints. Expecting experts from different distribution packaging team will be there to help.
- Packaging AnjaliOldLipi,  Meera Tamil and SakalMarathi for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu

I am sure we will have at least srpm ready for these packages for Fedora. Hoping debian packagers attending here will also able to push up .deb packages.


Input Method 

(Sprint 1)

ibus-typing-booster
    - Packaging for Debian and Ubuntu

 Now sure about this yet. :( So looking around Debian and Ubuntu packagers.
 Porting ibus-typing-booster to fcitx is not required as fcitx following little bit different architecture. Thanks for fcitx main developer for explaination.

 (Sprint 3)

ibus-typing-booster
Presentation and testing event.

I am excited for this. I am damn sure attending will have so much to take out after this sprint.

(Sprint 4)
Plan is to create layout images for inscript2 layout.
- Keyboard Layout Images
    - Porting mapper scripts to support inscript2 layouts
    - Update Fedora wiki images of keyboard layout


Parag is going to lead this session. Looking forward we will have something handy and helpful in this session.

  Welcome to all attendis.

Please ignore typos and grammar mistake ;)

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/10/open-source-language-summit-nov-2013-in.html

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Lohit Devanagari Beta release test file screenshot !!

Lohit Devanagari

Lohit 2 Devanagari Beta is out already[1]. This is screenshot during testing

Testing Environment :
Fedora 19, Application gedit
gnome-shell-3.8.4-2.fc19.x86_64
harfbuzz-0.9.23-1.fc20.x86_64
lohit-devanagari-fonts-2.92.0-1.fc19.noarch
Source file: https://raw.github.com/pravins/lohit/master/devanagari/test-devanagari.txt


Same environment as above
Source file: http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/test-file-devanagari.txt

1. https://www.redhat.com/archives/lohit-devel-list/2013-November/msg00000.html

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Lohit2 surely helping identifying critical bugs and improve rendering stack for long time.

lohit-devanagari is almost ready for beta release after resolving number of issues reported at git [4]

I am happy while testing lohit2 devanagari we are not only fixing issues from fonts side but we found interesting bugs from application side as well.

Earlier it was from Harfbuzz NG side. [1] This bug sometime very difficult to identify since even when expected ligature does not come it looks like there is ligature. During thorough testing with hb-shape and by looking at glyph names we identified yes this is problem. Then we tested with other fonts around and no one was giving expected results.
Thanks to Behdad for quickly fixing this it made life easy for doing Beta release.

Now few days back we identified one more bug from Libreoffice [2] This is also tricky one. Surprisingly this was working well with NotoSans Devanagari so one might think it is font issue as it work well with other fonts.
But again with thorough analysis we found that changing glyph class of first-i-matra to base-class doesn't solve the issue but create other problem for forming reph ligatures.  [5]

This time survivor is Khaled, good to see he committed the fix today itself.  Though my testing is remainign but he resolved the root cause i think.

From Fedora side, as Fedora is the always leader for quick fixes from upstream. Caolan again proved that by providing build [3] for fix today itself. Thats simply great !!!

I am sure over the time we will done with Lohit2. We will definitely identified major issues in rendering stack of opensource and will have the fixes also ready with excellent people around. I am reoommending community member to participate in lohit2 testing since this will help for long time to have perfect fonts and Open type layout shapers around.

Though this making bit delay in lohit2 releases but i think perfection comes first :)


1. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69266
2. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=71080
3. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1025201
4. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues 
5. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70968#c9 

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

Open Source Language Summit Nov 2013 in Pune (Sprint ideas)

Hi All,

   I am sure people who were part of this summit last time must be excited to attend 2013 Open Source Language Summit as well.
   As a planning we (Parag and Anish) discussed possible hackthon's we can do in this summit and we listed down following items:

Language Support:
    Identifying availability of basic components for 287 languages. (Unicode, Locale, Fonts, IME and rendering support) Mostly comparing with Wikipedia and Fedora language support.

Fonts:
Lohit2 project for "Creating standard and reusable Open type tables for Indian script font" [1] has already took pace with the release of Lohit Devanagari Alpha and start of work on Gujarati and Kannada. Its humble goal of creating language rendering tables so that font can render perfect across platform makes it priority item for summit. Following are things we are planning.
(Sprint 1 )
- Lohit2
    - Hacking Telugu and Kannada Open type tables
    - Testing of Released Devanagari and Gujarati

(Sprint 2 )
Just idea presently on how we can use lohit2 reusable tables in long run
- Lohit-ise (Will give small 10min presentation on this)
    - Work on Devanagari and Gujarati fonts

(Sprint 3 )
Time to update font packages in major OS distribution. One can learn packaging through this sprints. Expecting experts from different distribution packaging team will be there to help.
- Packaging AnjaliOldLipi,  Meera Tamil and SakalMarathi for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu

Input Method 
Ibus typing booster [3] is predictive text input method supporting 41 languages  for in opensource world. Number of people using it and given positive feedback on it. During last few conference i got request from active opensource users to make it available on Debian and Ubuntu as well. Planning this activity in this summit.
(Sprint 1)
- ibus-typing-booster
    - Packaging for Debian and Ubuntu

(Sprint 2)
Not sure how much change will be need to port ibus-typing-booster to fcitx framework. Will discuss and see what we can do for this. Help from users and Developers of fcitx is welcome from all perspectives :)
- ibus-typing-booster
    - Porting to fcitx

(Sprint 3)
During last one year number of features has been added to it. Presentation and testing event for same.
- ibus-typing-booster
    - Presentation on ibus-typing-booster features
    - Testing for Indian IME's support

(Sprint 4)
Plan is to create layout images for inscript2 layout.
- Keyboard Layout Images
    - Porting mapper scripts to support inscript2 layouts
    - Update Fedora wiki images of keyboard layout

Rendering Engines
(Sprint 1)
This bug was identified during the lohit2 development. Unfortunately Behdad will not able to attend this summit, so will try to debug and see if we can provide patch to fix this.
- harfbuzz
    - hacking on  "glyph moving across syllable boundries" bug [2]


1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69266
3. https://fedorahosted.org/ibus-typing-booster/

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Workshop from W3C-India on "HTML 5 tour in India" 25th Sept 2013 Pune

    Cant call it exactly workshop, it was more like demonstrating power of HTML5 and explaining concepts and increasing awareness so more and more people start building powerful websites based on HTML5.

    Workshop  in Pune city  was one of the part of whole HTML5 tour in India. W3C India's plan was to cover major regions of India and spread the thought everywhere. W3C guys covered different topics at different cities (See program for more details [1]).

    Was lucky that after long time got a chance to meet Raymond Doctor, we discussed on some projects and planned to meet soon to discuss more on those. 

    First time got a chance to hear CDAC DG Prof. Rajat Moona [2] and liked his motivation speech of explaining how technologies evolved during the time.

    After his talk In pre-lunch session Michael smith [2] calmly explained W3C initiative and motivatoin behind each initiative. Basic motivation is solving the problems. He expressed his concern about though W3C is developing protocols faster but due to dependence on web browsers it does not reach to masses in timely manner.

    I really appreciate Michael for the way he answered each question from audience in very detailed way.

    Post lunch session was mainly on webRTC. I am really impressed with the demonstration of the webRTC and i am sure it is going to be one of the threat to video conferencing application. Some of Machael's session on webRTC are already available on youtube.

    Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni explained about the importance of epub3 guidelines w.r.t. complexities of Indian scripts.

       I have done some tweets during the workshop, one can find it from [4].

    Workshop was housefull. There were number of students present. Due to small size halls some audience was attending workshop on projectors. I think W3C should really improve this and next time plan for auditorium with more capacity.

    Since most of the people only attended one of the part of whole HTML5 tour, i requested w3cindia provide videos of sessions happened in other cities. I think it will be made available on w3cindia website.

1. http://www.w3cindia.in/HTML5-tour-2013/program.html (Still not understanding why this link is not opening in Firefox sometime)
2. http://www.cdac.in/html/message/dg-profile.aspx
3. http://people.w3.org/mike//
4. https://twitter.com/search?q=%40prravins%20%23html5&src=typd

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Before the alpha release of Lohit Devanagari from Lohit2 project

   I am hoping now most of the contributors around are aware regarding the lohit2 project. Before the Alpha release of Lohit Devanagari i think it is important to go through once again goals we planned for this project[1].

    Goals:

    1. Cleaning Lohit Open type tables.
    Highlights are as below
  • We rewritten all GSUB rules from scratch.
  • New rules are supporting both deva and dev2 script tag
  • Done testing on Harfbuzz as well with Uniscribe and its giving expected results.
  • Kept GPOS tables intact.
  • Effectiveness and efficiency [2]  (sfd file size is down by 28K and Binary file side is down by 4K)
    Found one bug w.r.t harfbuzz [3] and looking forward to get it resolved soon. Presently it is in know issue list.

    By Beta we will have some more improvement on this.

    2. Reusable Open type tables.
    We got two important suggestions on this line, so below are suggestions and action taken on it.
    1st suggestion
    To have feature file separate than shapes .sfd file for easy re-usability of OT rules.
  • Thanks to AravindaK, he has already done some work on that line[4], so just using those stuff. I have forked this gitrepo and doing some improvement in it. Once done will request Aravinda to merge with his repo.

    2nd suggestion
    To follow AGL[5] and to have readable glyph naming.  We were also thinking from this perspective.
  •   This has became a bit complex glyphlist.txt [6] suggest names like "kadeva" or uni0915. But we dont want to follow uni0915 as it is not very readable considering our re-usability goals.
  • {0915 (kadeva) + 094D (viramadeva) + 0937 (ssadeva)} following this create chances of glyph name string more than 31 characters limit.
  • So present plan is follow above "kadeva_viramadeva_ssadeva" as much as possible and if it goes above 31 characters we will discard "deva" part from glyphname.

    3. Following of existing standards/guidelines
    Dont know how many of you aware regarding "Devanagari Script Behaviour For Hindi"[7] Draft, so its basically guideline for Font developers. I have one blog pending on this. Though this is draft mode we are trying to follow this, since it is very informative and prepared after consulting to language experts.

    This is where we upto, if anything more needed do provide me your feedback. Also need to decide on release version, i think some version with -alpha will work.

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. Effective means it should work on all supported platform perfectly and efficient means compact and clear rule
3. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69266
4. https://github.com/aravindavk/
5. https://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/
6. http://kaz.dl.sourceforge.net/project/aglfn.adobe/glyphlist.txt
7. http://tdil-dc.in/tdildcTemp/articles/75443Consolidated%20Feedback%20&%20Observations%20on%20Draft%20Devnagari%20Script%20Behaviour%20Ver%201.4.8_June_13.pdf

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

One of the happenning event FUEL GILT conference 6-7 Sept 2013 @ Pune, India

    I would like to start this blogpost with saying one of the successful conference happened during recent times in GILT industry in India. One can get idea from the power packed program schedule[1] with highly weighted name like Mr. Sam Pitroda.

    One of the very useful things was govt. was involved in this conference. Govt's positive approach to get things done in opensource way was very motivating to opensource contributors. Hoping this will go further ahead and we will get major contributions from government in each opensource project like FUEL.

    Another point was most of the opensource contributors from well known organizations were present. It was really great to see all of them. Having Anivar from SMC in conference was very useful. He given very useful comments in most of the sessions.

    I am sure attendees now have clear understanding of complexities of Localization industry and hurricane task done by the communities over the years.

    Though first day Keynote speaker was not able to attend, Satish Mohan and Mahesh Kulkarni very nicely motivated the audience and educated them regarding FUEL efforts.

    I liked Zanata session from Ani Peter. Features available in Zanata project are really good. Specifically liked the feature of allowing two translator chat while working on same project and decide on words choice. Question from audience regarding having localize instance of Zanata was really well worth.

    Rajat Gupta session on "Towards generation of translation memories from varied file formats from distributed/unorganized data" created interest in audience regarding how can they use there different format localize data to create translation memory.
   
    Talk by Ms. Sushma Chitta on "Application of Simplified Technical English in globalization of the content." was interesting. The guidelines of  Simplified Technical English (STE) was nice. I am not aware regarding any such open standard.

    Rahul Bhalerao Ex-Red Hatter  explained the importants of understanding target audience thoroughly before doing translations.
   
    Good part from the  conference perspective was audience was very vocal and attentive.

    It was good meeting Karthik, mostly interacted with him on bugzilla and mailing list. He presented on WMF activities on i18n sides. Also good to Goraji after long time, i remember we worked together for fixing sorting issues in glibc. Looking forward to see some more contributions from him.

    Dinner was good had nice discussion with Mr. Pavanaja U B he told how he started developing open type fonts during 2001. (That time i was doing my first year of engineering ;)). He promised help for Lohit2 Kannada development.

    Had a nice conversation with Omshivaprakash. We were discussing about bug in gnome-shell [2] Tested it today but not able to reproduce same. Was happy to see one more gnome-shell fan. :)

    Arjuna Rao Chavala talk was nice and his interest in improving Indian language uses across communities is impressive. Though English is important as a business language i am sure people will not forget there language. Easy to use basic i18n components are key factors.

    Twitting was good experience in this conference with gang :)

    Second day keynote by Mr. Sam Pitroda was great. He provided information regarding National Translation Mission and also emphasized on point that Machine translation is required to handle huge data.

    Talk by Mr. Guntupalli Karunakar on "Indic fonts: Guidelines and Standardization" was well taken, i am sure Lohit2 [3] will solve number of issues presented by him.

    Anivar explained importants of targeting mobile devices for Indian languages. Lots of work needed to happen in that domain.

    Enjoyed interaction with audience during my talk on IME's evolution. Good part was audience included highly experience localization people and same time there was developers working on i18n components and last but not the least the student/freshers wanted to learn as much as they can. I am sure that audience understood the problem and soon we will have my new proposed IME architecture available everywhere. Lots of expected from me, hoping will try to do it.

    Panel discussion was good. We saw good scope for further development of FUEL. Though at sometime we were loosing direction Ankit did well to keep focus on FUEL only.

    Soon one can get presentations pdf and also videos of talk recording on youtube. I missed Dr.  Nagarjuna G during this conference as he is the one who bring me to Indian language computing and opensource.

    I would like to end this blog by thanking Rajesh, Ankit, Chandrakant for organizing such a nice conference. Expecting some more next time :)


1. http://www.fuelproject.org/gilt2013/program
2. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1005471
3. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Project: Creating standard and reusable Open type tables for Indian script fonts

Background information:

     As most of you know Lohit [1] is one of the widely used and default Open source fonts for most of the Indian languages. It gives perfect rendering irrespective of OTLS (though now it is harfbuzz-ng earlier there were different open type layout shapers icu, pango, qt).

    Earlier due to incompatibility of different open type layout shapers we did number of bug fixes in Lohit fonts which created some redundant gsub tables, even i will say some logically wrong gsub table to get perfect rendering on all OTLS. Also in some of the script fonts like Kannada we have some unnecessary glyphs.

    During this time we got Open Type 1.6 specification (Dev2) and also long awaited Harfbuzz NG [2] project in now working and included in most of the leading project. (Gnome, Libreoffice etc.)

What is goal?

1. Cleaning Lohit Open type tables.

        Basically going to rewrite open type tables for all script fonts present in Lohit as per OT 1.6 specification by following best practices (compact OT tables by using minimum glyphs as much as possible).

 2. Reusable Open type tables.

    Discussed this idea in last year language summit in Pune with Aravinda.

    So basically we have very limited number of fonts for Indian script and i think one of the reason behind that is complexity of creating fonts for Indian language. It requires script, designing/calligraphy and engineering knowledge (OT technology, hinting) and bit other technicalities.

    Providing easy to use, reusable open type stuff will definitely remove some complexities from this. In long term it will help to make font developers life easy.

3. Extension to Open type specification.

    Again this started in Lang summit 2013 with Santhosh. We created initial draft in sumeet (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f8rCjva6AceWuzoOXMTeK24IoyBRUErtRm0Zrvyn0S8/edit#heading=h.c7vik2gjwesj) for this and i think santhosh has moved bit more forward in this.

    Basic motivation behind this was existing open type specification is not providing sufficient information for Indian script and font developer need to create guess work while writing Open type tables. So we want to have one specific standard for Indic scripts.

        So basically we can add and update this standard while rewriting open type tables of Lohit.



Present status of project

    This project is presently available at https://github.com/pravins/lohit2, Presently Sneha [3] is actively working on it. if anyone interested feel free to join.


1. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit
2. http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/HarfBuzz/
3. https://github.com/snehakore

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Indic typing booster is now ibus-typing-booster

   I am sure that most of the Fedora users should be familiar with this change. We started this change due to number of architectural changes and increase in the scope of project.

  ibus-typing-booster is very actively developed in last couple of years and now has number of essential and add-on features required for predictive text input method.  I will soon start documenting these features and if time permits will create one screencast demonstrating it.

  Since indic-typing-booster  mailing list does not going to have anymore update from onwards, i will simply add all id's subscribed here to ibus-typing-booster (cc'ed) mailing list and disable indic-typing-booster mailing list.

  Looking forward to have some good debates on ibus-typing-booster soon.

  Thanks all for supporting, motivating and contributing to indic-typing-booster.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Fedora shows Tofu (Square Box/Dabba) for following Unicode scripts

Was just going through GUCharmap to check how many scripts are still not covered with the default fonts installation of Fedora. Still number of fonts required to remove Square-Box/Tofu/डब्बा/ and provide at least single font for each script of Unicode. Though i think NBMP ( non basic multilingual plane script) is not high priority target first but at least other script on BMP which are in active use must be supported.

Thought it will take long time.

Below is the list from GUCharmap showing for scripts represented as  Tofu/SquareBox :)

Missing fonts in fedora

- Avestan
- Balinese
- Bamum
- Batak
- Brahmi
- Buhid
- Carian
- Chakma  - NBMP
- Cham
- Cuneiform
- Cypriot - NBMP
- Deseret - NBMP (supported by noto)
- Egyptian Heiroglyphs - NBMP
- Imperial Aramaic - NBMP
- Inscriptional Pahlavi - NBMP
- Inscriptional Parthian - NBMP
- Javanese
- Kaithi - NBMP
- Kharoshthi - NBMP
- Limbu - NBMP
- Lisu
- Lycian - NBMP
- Lydian - NBMP
- Mandaic - NBMP
- Meroitic Cursive - NMBP
- Meroitic Hieroglyphs - NBMP
- Miao - NBMP
- Mangolian
- New Tai Lue
- Ol Chiki
- Old South Arabian - NBMP
- Old Turkic - NBMP
- Phags Pa - NBMP
- Rejang
- Samaritan
- Saurashtra
- Sharda - NBMP
- Shavin - NBMP
- Sora Sompeng - NBMP
- Sundanese
- Syloti  Nagri
- Tagalog
- Tagbanwa
- Tai Tham
- Tai Viet
- Takri - NBMP

While comparing this with Google's noto fonts, they have provided fonts for some of the scripts in the above list. Will add those to Fedora soon.

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Resolved Lohit Oriya rendering issues with Harfbuzz NG

Couple of weeks back got to know there are some combination of Oriya breaking with Harfbuzz. Bug [1] was earlier reported against Zanata but later on with further review understood it is actually font problem.

Cross checking with Windows found those are breaking with Uniscribe as well.

One of that combination was 123 Gsub listed at UTTRS[1]

 ର୍ତ୍ତ  (U+0B30 U+0B4D U+0B24 U+0B4D U+0B24)

Reph was not allowing to form expected ligature

Same way there are some other combination like 52 ( ଞ୍ଜ)

If someone type ି or ୈ,  It was not allowing to form expected ligature.

Fixed these combinations in upstream now.  [2]
Build lohit-oriya-fonts-2.5.3-3.fc18 will be available in tomorrow update-testing repo. [3]


Fedora language testing day is planned on 2013-05-02 [4]


If none more issues get reported during this test day, i will do next release of lohit-oriya that is 2.5.4.


[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=923215
[2] http://utrrs-testing.rhcloud.com/language/or/gsub            
[3] https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/lohit.git/commit/?id=28986ab3956df5cb96c3ec383641f1cb0fa4c04a   
[4] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/lohit-oriya-fonts-2.5.3-3.fc18
[5] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2013-05-02_Localization_%28i18n%29




Tuesday, April 23, 2013

My view on Automated_Rendering_Testing idea for GSoc from SMC

Just couple of days someone ask my view on this project. Today got some time to go through it, below are my comments.

Project idea is written her http://wiki.smc.org.in/SoC/2013/Project_ideas#Automated_Rendering_Testing

1. I really like that someone picked this idea for GSoC. This is something we are looking from long time in UTRRS.
    UTRRS has one basic drawback that manual intervention is needed to get actual rendering problem.
    So if some intelligent algorithm program can automatically verify standard images and on the fly generated image from font to be tested and provide comparison that will be simply great.

    When i gone through project title i thought this is going to be happen in this project.

    I am not sure what is exact plan for implementation.

2. It is written in project idea "One method to do this might be to check the order of glyphs/glyph index output by the rendering engine - this depends on the font too."

   Actually in Harfbuzz we are already doing this thing with scripting.  Behdad has implemented best testing suite for testing rendering of complex script. It happnes following way.

  Script first passes particular word and font to be tested to Uniscribe. It returns some glyphs id's/hex values in fonts.

  Then script passes same word and font to Harfbuzz. It also returns some glyphs id/hex values in fonts.

   Assuming fonts works 100% perfect in Uniscribe and considering it as a standard output. If harfbuzz output (hex values) matches with uniscribe (hex values) it means it is rendering perfect else test fails.

  With this method in harfbuzz we already automatically testing millions of words.

3. In my humble opinion this project should be plan with my first point. I do agree it is tough and might be bit research kind but i think that is the right way. Harfbuzz is already doing automates rendering testing by passing values to unscribe and other open type layout engines.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Open source language summit 2013 at Red Hat Pune and Me

Almost at the end of second day of Open source language summit at Red Hat Pune more details regarding it are available at [1]

This blog is specifically for the things on which i worked on in this summit.

1. Standard for Open font format for script of India
It is available at [2] in very initial stage right now. With this document we are trying to improve Indian language fonts development experience of Typographers or Font Designers.
But how? good question :)

See today number of Latin fonts available freely and also in open source environment but not Indian fonts number in that strength.

Agree there might be many reasons but one of that is complexity of development OFF fonts. Unlike Latin it is not simply design but also handling complex script features like reordering, ligature and understanding open font format.

We are planning to make this standard document so easy and simply that anybody want to develop font can simply design shapes required for script and follow some easy steps by referring references fonts like Lohit and done.

Though long road ahead but i am sure this step is in right way !!

2. Lohit fonts will be available as a Web fonts from upstream itself

Completed all work from updating Makefile in Lohit upstream (Thanks parag again for initial work :))

Got some useful information from Santhosh regarding sfntly tool from google for generating .eot and .woff

So from now onwards no need to rebuild lohit in other font format for using it as a Webfonts, just use lohit-