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-

2 comments:

kareti said...

is the standard document ready? or is it yet to come?

Pravin Satpute said...

Hi Kareti,

No standard document is not ready. In summit we drafted outline for document.

Santosh has created git repo for same, it is available @ https://github.com/santhoshtr/fontbook/