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 

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/