Few points of Fedora 21 release party @ TIFR, HBCSE, Mumbai

    Fedora 21 release party was planned in quick time, we can say in one week. Attendees were around 25. Few points regarding the event.

• We got number of people from different organization Red Hat, CDAC, TIFR, IIT, Gnowtantra and couple more.
• As far as i know first Fedora release party AT Mumbai 
• Anish nicely explained myths about Gnome.
• Praveen Kumar rather than giving presentation, actually demonstrated Docker, which created further interest in audience. 
• Rahul Bhalerao very nicely explained "How to contribute in Fedora". One can participate even when he is not software programmer.
• We got nice explanation from Dr. Nagarjuna G on Free software Vs Open source software. 
• During discussion with audience we found there is need for further events regarding Fedora AT Mumbai. Specifically one should be install-fest.
• We got excellent answer for question regarding running MS-Office with wine. Wine is developed to run Free software's available on Windows, so is it not good to spoil its intention by running non-free software with it. Libreoffice is good enough and already used by number of people.
• At the end of conference i am happy that we found Fedora enthusiast group At Mumbai and definitely we can do more events for Fedora in Mumbai in future.
• Other blog related to event
• http://kumar-pravin.blogspot.com/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party.html
• http://krazyabouttechnology.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party-in-mumbai.html
• http://fossevangelist.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party-homi-bhabha.html
• http://anish-patil.blogspot.in/2014/12/fedora-21-release-party.html
• http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2014/12/planning-experience-for-fedora-21.html

Planning experience for Fedora 21 release party At TIFR, HBCSE, Mumbai

    It was good experience to organize Fedora 21 release party At TIFR. Started this idea November last week by initial discussion with Rahul Bhalerao. Long time we did not had any Fedora release party in India. Fedora 21 Final release declared on 9th Dec 2014. Rahul agreed to be co-organizer for same. Second we started thinking for Venue. First place name came to our mind was TIFR, HBCSE. This is the place where we started our open source contribution in 2004 under the guidance of Dr. Nagarjuna G.

    We started initial email conversion with Dr. Nagarjuna G. we got go ahead response for same but finalizing date was tricky due to ICFOSS, Swatantra (http://icfoss.org/fs2014/) was happening during our planned date (20 Dec). We decided date 21st Dec (Idea was Celebrating Fedora 21 on 21st ☺).

    Got $100 budget from Fedora and also some travel budget for Pune-Mumbai from Red Hat.

    Second things was looking for qualified speakers. Fedora community is really nice. I discussed this with Ambassadors in Pune and Praveen kumar quickly jumped in for help with talk on cloud. Due to some reason Parag was not available during same time. Anish volunteered for Talk on Workstation. Me and Rahul took care for Fedora intro and How to contribute in Fedora. I wrote one blog earlier for speakers introduction.

    We had meeting on 15th Dec At TIFR for planning remaining activities. Created event page on Eventbrite  . This was my first event as an organizer and i was wondering on Sunday relaxing afternoon how many people can actually make it. Surprising 38 ticket got booked on eventbrite, it was really motivating.

    We got Fedora 21 DVD's just in time. Hats off to Siddhesh for helping for it and Rahul for collecting it from Siddhesh. We somehow managed it and made it available on 21st. Got few Fedora stickers from Rupali At Red Hat Pune.

    I placed order At http://monginis.net/. Online interface has less option. But once one place the order online, we can talk with there customer care with reference number. They delivered order on time.

    I would like to thanks Dr. Nagarjuna for allowing us to host release party At TIFR. It almost solved 50% of part. Next to Rahul Bhalerao for doing all things to make it successful release party. Praveen Kumar and Anish for volunteering as a speaker and also all attendees for making this successful

Why to attend Fedora 21 release party At Mumbai??

Fedora 21 release party happening tomorrow At TIFR, MUMBAI, more information AT eventbrite page


Well qualified speakers for topics
      Anish Patil:
       3+ years with Fedora. Actively working in gnome upstream. He is one of the main developer of ibus typing booster. He is maintaining 15 packages in Fedora. He is going to talk on Fedora workstation product features.

      Praveen Kumar:
     Actively working 4+ years with Fedora community. He own 34 packages and is member of provenpackager and ambassador group of Fedora. He has already talked in dozens of open source conferences. For more information click [2]
   
    Pravin Satpute:
    7+ years in Fedora. Own 43 packages and proven packager in Fedora. Team member of Internationalization, Marketing and Ambassador group.

    Rahul Bhalerao:
    He is working 8+ year with Fedora community. He is team member of Fedora internationalization team and participated as a speaker in number of open source conferences. Being long time Fedora contributor he is going to talk on How to contribute to Fedora project. For more information about him click [4]

Happening AT TIFR, HBCSE Mumbai
        TIFR centre is well known for number of open source initiative. Gnowledge.org is one of those major activity. Learning Studio is widely used Fedora 17 remix for educational activities. We are trying to upgrade this on Fedora 21 release. In 2004 when there was very few open source Indian languages fonts were there. TIFR took initiative and started project on developing open source Samyak fonts. These fonts are available in most of the open source distribution.

Fedora 21 DVD:
        Will provide DVD's of Workstation and Servers to participant. Lots of stickers and goodies to few lucky ones :)

Fedora activity AT Mumbai After long time:
    Fedora activity happening in Mumbai after long time. Lets come meet and plan for some future activities around Fedora in Mumbai.

1. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Anishpatil
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Kumarpraveen
3. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pravins
4. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:RahulBhalerao
5. https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fedora-21-release-party-tickets-14972818102

Talked on Lohit2 project AT 38th Internation Unicode Conference (IUC)

Last month (4th Nov) i gave talk AT 38th IUC[1], yes i did. :)

Did not able to attend conference due to traveling issues. Lucky enough got a chance to give presentation over Google Hangout. IUC is full with interesting and fruitful talks. Most of the attendees used to be busy for attending talk and networking with key contributors. Would like to give special thanks to Behdad for helping to setup GHangout session during conference and also Rick McGowan for allowing me to give talk over hangout.

Trust me it was difficult as per IST my talk [2] was schedule early morning at 4:00am. Everything went well and given presentation at IUC 38.

My talk was on Lohit2 project. I took workshop in IUC 36 conference for creating open type fonts for complex script. In that workshop i explained how its tricky to develop OT fonts for complex script due to involvement of technical, designing and linguistic. In this different domain there is fair possibility of standardizing technical stuff related to open type fonts. Its almost repeatative.

In IUC 38 i presented Lohit2. Project which aims to create easy to reuse standard, effective and efficient open type tables. For Lohit things even become easy for reusability since it is under open source license.

IUC is special conference since this is the time when most of the expert in language computing domain come together. I got nice audience for my talk and had interesting Q&A session later.

Thanks Behdad for this snap. Was not able to see early with whom i am talking :)

I ended my talk with the hope of achieving next milestone in making font developers life easy by making just click and import templates for complex script fonts. Then only things left for designer is to design typeface.  My slides are available in slideshare.  [3]

1. http://www.unicodeconference.org/iuc38/
2. http://www.unicodeconference.org/program-d.htm#S4-3
3. http://www.slideshare.net/pravinds/pravin-s-lohit2

Next releases (2.91.1) of Tamil, Assamese and Bengali available with critical bug fixes.

   We did alpha release of Tamil, Assamese and Bengali earlier. During testing we found following issues.

• Lohit Tamil was not rendering correctly due to issue with auto hinting with fontforge in font.  [1]
• Lohit Assamese and Bengali fonts conjucts were breaking with Matras. [2]
  

    Both critical bugs are resolved in 2.91.1 version.

    Other than this, we did thorough testing of these fonts in Windows XP. Fixed number of rendering issues with XP.
    Few issues still exist [3][4] . These issues are mentioned in README file of specific fonts. Planning to resolve these issues in coming release.

    Font are available to download from fedorahosted. [5]  Need your help for further testing and making it more perfect. Feel free to report issues or provide suggestion at github [6] or mailing list.

    Thanks to Nilamdyuti Goswami, Shantha Kumar, Felix and capellsk for testing and providing input.


1. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/56
2. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/57
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/20
4. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/24
5. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/
6. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/new

Next improved release of Lohit Devanagari 2.95.0 with Latin and ttfautohinted.

    Last release of Lohit Devanagari we did in Feb 19, 2014. During the time number of improvements happened in Lohit Devanagari. Today releasing its next version with all the improvements. [1]

    Following are the improvements:
    1. Added Latin from https://github.com/etunni/lohit-latin
            Yes, This happened :)
            I would like to thanks Dave for this, who helped to get Latin for Devanagari done from  Eduardo Rodriguez Tunni. Now one will not feel major difference while rendering of Lohit Devanagari text with Latin since Lohit has Latin coverage itself.

    2. One of the requirement of ttfautohint is to have Latin support in fonts. (AFAIK) Due to this we were not using ttfautohint for building Lohit Devanagari. Now since we have Latin in Lohit Devanagari, we have started building ttf with ttfautohint. It means Lohit Devanagari now requires ttfautohint as a build requirement.

    2. We started compiling feature file with Adobe font development kit. (AFDKO).
            As announced earlier as well.
            Feature file of Lohit Devanagari was not compiling in OTM. [2] Root cause of problem was fontforge is bit relax while validating feature file. Had good discussion with Dave and Frank on this and finally we decided to compile feature file with AFDKO. [3]

            This also helped us to further identified issues in feature file and we fixed those issues in feature file.

    3. Updated sfd file with resolved issues regarding Marathi locale (issue id on github: #46,#47)
            These were local related issues not tested well earlier.

    4. Improved Vedic accent positioning issues. Resolves issue #https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/11

    5. Added new characters uni1cf5 and uni1cf6

    Looking forward for Dave's more support to add Latin in all Lohit script fonts. Enjoy improved version of Lohit Devanagari.  Please report if any issues at github [4]. I have updated fedorahosted.org/lohit [5] page with download details

    I want to verify Lohit Devanagari with Hindi script gramme [6] and make sure it follows all rules. Soon i am going to ping some linguist who can help into this.

Cheers,
Pravin Satpute
1. https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/o/lohit/lohit-devanagari-ttf-2.95.0.tar.gz
2. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/13
3. https://github.com/adobe-type-tools/afdko
4. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/new
5. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/
6. http://www.tdil-dc.in/index.php?option=com_vertical&parentid=79&lang=en

FUELGILT 2014 conference and my activities

Last weekend i was fully involved in fuel conference. Lots of things i can share about the conference. Let me first start with my role in it.

1.  Representing Fedora @ conference.
2. My talk about "Why Globalization? world wide picture"
3. Celebrating 10 yrs of Lohit project and workshop on Lohit2.

1. Represented Fedora @ conference.

    We started planning for this event with Fedora Ambassador group well 2 months in advance and designed T-shirts for branding Fedora as a best platform for Language computing. This T-shirt was distributed to all active contributors to promote message Fedora perfect from language computing perspective. Most of them were available in conference wearing this T-shirt, it truly made people aware regarding yes Fedora takes care for language computing aspects and proud for same.

    I met number of people in conference and talked on how can Fedora help them. Specifically mentioned language team is very active in Fedora, most of the innovations happened first in Fedora including IBus, Harfbuzz and Updates regarding Fonts also gets in quickly in Fedora. Fedora i18n team weekly meets AT #fedora-meeting on Tuesday  06:00:00 to 07:00:00 UTC and discuss open issues.

    Analysed issues mentioned by ShivaKumar K.M  regarding corpus processing and requested Biraj Karmakar  to test Fedora 21 for Bengali and provide some report.

    Parag given talk on "How to create hunspell dictionary on Fedora". It was very well attended talk from audience. They learned practically on how to make hunspell dictionary from simple word-list and see it working. It increased there interest on hunspell dictionary. I talked with Omshivaprakash and he suggested it is possible to get some online tool for maintaining hunspell. This is the same thought we were thinking from last couple of months also discussed same with Libreoffice Caolan. Already some work has been done and soon will publish same.

    Parag also demonstrated wordxtr package avaialable in Fedora. He demonstrated it with html page and shown how quickly one can extract words with it.

    Wanted to distribute some Fedora stickers but somehow missed to collect some from Siddhesh before he moves to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for FAD.

    Discussed with Arky about how much language support Firefox OS does has and they also facing same issues which we were face some years back. In Fedora now we have nicely written criteria for language support. I mentioned him, link is here :)

    Event page for FUELGILT 2014 conference

    Overall i am happy with the presence of the Fedora in this conference. Will improve it further in upcoming conference around Language Technology.

    I would like to thanks here Rajesh, Chandrakant and Ankit for supporting activities around Fedora in this conference.

2. My talk about "Why Globalization? world wide picture"

    This was the first talk on second day. We got pleasing but unexpected rain that day. It delayed most of things. Since i was the first speaker most of the arrangements for speakers happened that time. Started talk around 10:15am.

    Its tricky subject to present. In this talk i targeted the users. Mentioned the importance of supporting not only major language of world but also as much as possible on platform. How it is important to preserve first languages of people. I have mentioned couple of important research that has been done to showcase how persons first language is very important. Also how first language can help for effective branding of products.

    Slides are available At slideshare Soon we will have youtube video for my talk.
   
3. Celebrating Lohit 10 yrs of Lohit project and workshop on Lohit2.

    This is moment i was waiting for long time. Though number of plans were there. We decided we will celebrate with cake in conference like FULEGILT where number of open source contributors and users get together.

    Cake arrived on time and we just thought lets start workshop by cutting it.
    Audience suggested Shilpa (present actively working on lohit2), Rahul Bhalerao (past maintainer of Lohit) and me to cut cake together.

    Later we had small presentation on Lohit 10 years. In this presentation Shilpa explained why Lohit project is important, What are the achievement of Lohit project in 10 years and what is plan for future through lohit2 project.

    Already big blog, will write one more to mention things happened in conference. Photo credits to Krishnababu and Bhushan :)

Celebrating 10 years of Lohit fonts project

   I am sure in open source it is rare to find people who are not aware of Lohit fonts [1] or not used it over the years. It is default fonts for number of Indian language in Most of the open source distribution including Fedora, Debian. It was used in early version of Android for Indian languages. It is used in Wikipedia as a Web fonts. Recently Unicode started using it for building Tamil code charts.     When talking these are the just few achievement of Lohit project during the time and list is much longer.

Image created by Shilpa

       Numbers of developers from different communities has contributed to Lohit to make it successful project. Of course one cant forget the contribution from Red Hat by continuously supporting it and making sure the open source project will get industry standard open source Indic font.

    Lohit project completing its 10 years this Nov 2014. Luckily the fuelgilt conference 2014 is happening during the same time. We thought its good time to celebrate the 10 years of Lohit in FUEL GILT Conference - the largest event of FOSS language technology.

    Our workshop in Lohit fonts is accepted by conference and it is going to happen tomorrow AT 12:30pm fuelgilt conference, Pune India . [2] If you are around do come to celebrate this success. We are going to talk how Lohit project started, how it remain active during the tough times of non-standardize open type layout shapers. What is stands presently and how Lohit2 project going to make Lohit project as one of the standard reference platform for upcoming fonts developments for Indian language.

1. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit
2. http://fuelproject.org/gilt2014/program

Next week Diwali festival in India

Its Diwali festival next week in India.

If you feel you are not getting reply for emails from someone from India or not update on bugzilla from package maintainer just be patient. Its diwali time :)

If one dont know regarding festival read AT http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali

Most of the offices used to have back-to-back holidays during this.

I will be working till Monday 20th and then will be away for a week.

Fedora 21 Beta freeze today !!

Fedora 21 Beta freeze today, so if any build pending from you do build it quickly. Not only that ping and ask for quick testing and karma.

I done with 3 important build yesterday from my side.

1. Lohit Assamese: Default font for Assamese language. Pushed latest upsteam release.
2. Lohit Bengali: Default font for Bengali language. Pushed latest upstream release.
3. Lohit Tamil: Default font for Tamil fonts. Pushed latest upstream release.

Pending stuff from me is liberation fonts. I have fixed number of Fedora bugs in ustream and release is pending from me. Once i will do with upstream release will build it first for rawhide and then for Fedora 21.

Release of Lohit Assamese 2.91.0 just after Lohit Bengali 2.91.0

Very natural move. Assamese and Bengali fonts are not much different just 09F0 (ৰ) &  09F1 (ৱ) are extra in Assamese.

Frankly there is no need to create different fonts for these languages. Since we can have OT rules written for 09F0 (ৰ) &  09F1 in same fonts. Bengali user never type these characters and when assamese user will type these character he can get expected rendering.

But Assamese and Bengali communities has strong opinion regarding font  names. Why should Assamese user use Bengali language fonts?

Even recently Assamese communities convinced Unicode to have "Assamese and Bengali" name to Unicode chart rather than only Bengali. There point was there is nothing like Bengali script in Assamese. Do update if i am missing something.

Lohit project respect user communities and will keep Assamese fonts separate. I can remove characters not used in Assamese from Bengali fonts and viceversa for Bengali but its very minor and i dont want one to install other font specifically for two characters.

One more reason to do this release quickly after Lohit Bengali is to make sure we can get testing from wider community.

Other release specific detail is available lohit archive email
 

Fedora has the latest google-noto-fonts with addition of 44 new font families

Last week i done with packaging latest upstream release of Google's ambitious project Noto fonts  (google-noto-fonts).

Last time we packaged it on Aug 2013 with 69 subpackage. With this latest package Fedora 21 has got all the improvements done in upstream over the year.

New package google-noto-fonts has 106 packages. 44 New packages over the earlier release from Google.

I am planning to write one article in FedoraMagzine for it, mentioning how tricky it was to package it for Fedora and what are benefits Fedora gets by packaging noto fonts. What are the missing things in Noto fonts. Stay tuned !!

Bodhi link here

Lohit Bengali alpha version 2.91.0 is released under Lohit2 project

Was expecting to release Lohit Bengali around June 2014 but it took more time due to priorities of some other work including glibc.

Finally work with Shilpa last couple of week last week and completed this milestone. :)

Lohit Bengali 2.91.0 has number of improvements over earlier release.

TTF size is reduced from 140K to 128K (still some improvement possible by removing halant form which can easily formed by GPOS )

Standard compliance is one more thing happened with this release. Unicode, OpenType spec. If we are still missing something do point us to particular document.

Looking forward for more testing and more improvement in Bengali.

Do read lohit-devel email for more information.

Lohit Tami 2.91.0 now available for testing

Done with the release of Lohit Tamil 2.91.0 with the improvements planned under Lohit2 project.

Following are highlights:

1. Rewritten all Open type tables with supporting taml and tml2 tags.
2. Renamed all the glyphs by following AGL syntax.
3. Open type tables are available in .fea file and this time it is compiled with AFDKO.
4. Reusing glyphs by "COPY REFERENCE"
5. Added GRID FITTING table and auto-hinting by fontforge. (Need to use ttfautohint but we need Latin support to do that)
   
6. Tested with Harfbuzz NG and Uniscribe (W8)  (Need to test on WinXp yet)
7. Auto test module available with test files. (Please help me to add more test cases.)

This release now support characters required for minority orthographies. For more details visit bugzilla

Stopped using deprecated ligature for SRII. See bugzilla for more information.

Compiling Lohit fonts feature file with Adobe Font Development Kit

This first came to notice with issue "OTM error #13". Everything was working perfectly with fontforge, creating feature file and importing feature file back :)

But certainly above issue open up number of issues with this process. Font designers were not able to import .fea file due to this issue.

Thanks to Dave and Frank for pointing to issue and directing me towards Adobe Font Development Kit (AFDKO). Adobe is the one created specification for .fea file and provided nice tools to compile it.  Most of the information already available AT http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/topic_overview.html 

 This blog is specifically to update how i am using AFDKO in Lohit project.

Steps:
1. Write open type tables for Lohit fonts in Fontforge.
2. Export .fea file
3. Generate .ttf by importing .fea file to it using following commands.
4. makeotf -f Lohit-Tamil.ttf -ff Lohit-Tamil.fea

Makeotf is python wrapper over makeotfexe. makeotfexe can not process .ttf generated from fontforge. 
In first step makeotf convert .ttf provided to unix Type1 font.

It fails with error but it generates unix Type1 font required for makeotfexe.

What errors :)

  makeotf command pass following arguments to makeotfexe

  "makeotfexe "-f" "Lohit-Tamil.ttf.tmp" "-o" "Lohit-Tamil.ttf.temp_cff" -ff "Lohit-Tamil.fea" -ga -gf "Lohit-Tamil.ttf.temp.GOADB" -mf "FontMenuNameDB" -shw"

In above argument  "-ga -gf "Lohit-Tamil.ttf.temp.GOADB"  are not required but somehow automatically gets added by makeotf.

* We should replace -ga with -nga for not using GlyphOrderAndAliasDB. GlyphOrderAndAliasDB file is provided for ease of writing feature file.

* User can write feature file with user friendly names and use GlyphOrderAndAliasDB for adding name required as per standard.

* If one not using  GlyphOrderAndAliasDB, he should remove "-ga -gf "Lohit-Tamil.ttf.temp.GOADB"  and put -nga instead.

But makeotf done one good job of converting source font 'Lohit-Tamil.ttf' to temporary Unix Type1 font file 'Lohit-Tamil.ttf.tmp'

You will requires FontMenuDB file. Its content should be as per fonts. Font Lohit
[psatpute@dhcp201-194 bengali]$ cat FontMenuNameDB
[Lohit-Devanagari]
    f=Lohit Devanagari
    s=Regular
    l=Lohit Devanagari

5. run makeotfexe removing problem cuasing arguments.
 makeotfexe "-f" "Lohit-Tamil.ttf.tmp" "-o" "Lohit.ttf" -ff "Lohit-Tamil.fea" -nga -mf "FontMenuNameDB" -shw

And here get you Lohit.ttf build by adding .fea file with AFDKO.

Hope so it will help to some others as well.

I specifically found this very useful for finding issues in Lohit-Devanagari.fea files.

Lohit Tamil in Unicode charts

This is news to me as well :)

 Just came to know from comment that Lohit Tamil is used in Unicode charts from 7.0 onwards.  I did quick comparison with old Tamil chart and 7.0 and yes that is Lohit !!

Kudos to Shriramana for making this happen with proposal. I remember we were talking about this last year and due to OFL license of Lohit it is easy to use it in Unicode charts without any permission.

This add more responsibility to make sure Lohit Tamil follows and keep glyphs consistent in future version. I am sure with strong community we can achieve it.


 I have been always proposing Unicode for using opensource fonts in there charts. Unicode definitely spending some money to make fonts for these charts, so why not to release these charts under opensource license?


 Presently charts only serve the purpose of reference and even after release of particular version even for single character users need to wait for other fonts to sync with latest Unicode version. If Unicode release latest version of charts with fonts as well, one can just quickly install those fonts. These fonts can be used in all OS due to liberal license, many things can happen...

  Second part that is faced specifically in complex script, is reference for rendering rules. Yeah, this can add additional overhead to Unicode but i strongly feel it can help further to have standardization in complex script rendering.

  Anyway we are already trying for this with Lohit2 project, hopefully  other script fonts project will also start this kind of initiative and in long term font designers will be free from worry of rules for complex script rendering.

  Again glad to see this is happening !!
 

"Devanagari script behaviour for Hindi" standardization meeting AT Delhi on 10th Sep2014

    DIT is working on this project with CDAC and other stakeholder almost from 2+ years. I am one of the committee member of this working group and making sure it will actually benefit target audience.
We have invested earlier time on what should be the structure of this document and what things must be included in this documents.
    Also we had excellent debate with language scholars on what is valid combination in Hindi language and what is not. How particular combination should get displayed. We made one significant decision saying we will not say anything is invalid, since there is possibility of inclusion of words from other language to Hindi and end use must be able to type it.
    Number of things happened over the time from 1.3.1 version to latest 1.4.4 and finally we are very closer to have final release of this document.

    Highlights of this Draft:
    1. Target audience is ICT stakeholders.
    2. Platform owner interested in supporting particular language in his product will get complete information from locale, sorting, backspace, delete, rendering etc from single document. One can also say this document is simply including standards around Hindi language at one place. Those are Unicode, CLDR and language related standards.
    3. For Hindi draft reference is used from book "देवनागरी लिपि तथा हिंदी वर्तनी का मानकीकरण"  Central Hindi Directorate"

    Yesterday we quickly gone through draft to make sure conjuncts are represented properly in document. Hindi mostly uses half form of base characters unlike complete conjuncts get form in Marathi language.

    Draft is still open [1] for comments and feedback. Once Hindi will get finalized same process will be repeated for other language and all these Draft will get authenticated from BIS as a standards.  For other languages DIT will first prepare draft and in later stage talk with state governments for Feedback. Next one will be Marathi since most of the things are already ready for Marathi languages.

    I hope this will help to community over the time.


1. http://www.tdil-dc.in/index.php?option=com_vertical&parentid=79&lang=en

Lohit2: Improvement plans for Lohit-Tamil

   In last phase we did excellent improvements in Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi and Malayalam with Lohit2 projects. Bengali is already done i need to test it for completeness then i can do the release of same soon.

  Now remaining are Kannada, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu. We are moving ahead and started working on Tamil development now.

  Improvements we are planning to do are as follows:

• Renaming glyphs as per AGL.
• Rewriting Open type rules following 'taml' and "tml2" [1]
• Create testing file which covers most of the combinations.
• Testing with Harfbuzz and Uniscribe.
• Auto testing module.
• Feature file compiled with AFDKO. (Adobe fonts development kit for Open Type) [2]
• Follow Tamil script standards. Unicode.
  

   We have already started development on lohit2 git [3]

   I need help specifically for following items.

• Creating test file with adding important combinations.
• Identifying standards around Tamil script, i did not found other than Unicode yet.

   If one dont know about lohit2 project, do read blog [4]

1. https://www.microsoft.com/typography/OpenTypeDev/tamil/intro.htm#appendix
2. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/issues/13
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2/

4. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html

#flocktofedora 7th and 8th August AT Prague, Czech Republic and me !!

   If you missed my earlier blog, read it here

    First talk of the 7th morning for me was "From Schedule to (awesome)". The important thing we should note is EOL bug closing. Almost 4 to 5 thousands bugs get auto closed during EOL. Yes, Reporter'ss do get notifications regarding closing of bugs but i think developers should take active involvement and make sure any relevant bug should not get closed without fix.

    Next talk from "Tuan Anh Truong" on "Improving Ambassadors Mentor Program", he mentioned number of issues from Ambassadors program including he does not get replys from some of his ideas and again APAC budget was not used fully and this time it get reduced. He specifically said almost 30 Ambassadors from India but no one is active. I had discussion with him later on and promised that at least i will do some contribution.

    Keynote was nice, it is recorded and available on [1]

    During break i had nice conversation with Mattias and Christian about improving language support in Fedora and happy with there positive response, if time permits will definitely start drafting plan for this.

    After that we had some offline meeting on planning for Fedora 22.

    Attended last session of the day that is "Fedora.next.next: Planning for Fedora 22". This session where we had open house type discussion and taken mostly inputs from most of the attendees. We noted down positive, negative things in Fedora. what we can do for Fedora 22. It was long session but very fruitful session.

    Later we had boat party. It was nice party, i specifically loved the food :)

    3rd day we had talk from Jens on "Fedora i18n: Past, Present and Future". I really liked the way he covered i18n changes over the last almost 10 years. One of the most informative talk on i18n after long time. Video for it available on [2]

    After this session we had big discussion with Carlos of glibc. We specifically talked glibc Unicode support, Sorting issues and synchronising data with CLDR. We did some rough planning for future development. Most probably it will be proposed as a feature for next releases of glibc. Me, Mike, Anish and Jens were involved in this discussion.

    Lunch was very good on 3rd day, it was bit spicy. I liked it :) Not even used spices, i specifically brought from India.

    Fedmsg workshop was very informative for people interesting in building app on Fedora messaging stuff. Ralph Bead given nice tips for doing it. If you still not there join #fedora-fedmsg on Freenode and see how it tracks each change in Fedora.

    Last workshop i attended was from Parag and Haikel. The workshop is specifically memorable since 2 FPC, 9 package sponsors were present there. !!

    Third day we got some time in the evening and done some shopping. Its awesome to walk on Prague's road. Did not attended Dance party planned on 3rd day.

    As i written in earlier blog as well, so many things happen so do check #flocktofedora for more information.

    Ohh i missed to write, we took GROUP PHOTO on 3rd day. Jared Smith Rocks !!!  Original photo available AT [3]

    My earlier blog on First day is available AT [4]

    Will add photos in my FB and tagged it with Fedora

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzGEBJLlUIc
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WGL9hFcY_w
3. https://jsmith.fedorapeople.org/Flock2014/

My first day of FLOCK 2014 at Prague, Czech Republic

    Actually i dont like international travel due to involvement of troublesome VISA process, long travel time and all immigration kind of stuff. This time i decided to attend Fedora conference since it almost 7+ years with Fedora and only one conference that was FudCon in Pune 2011. On the other hand number of things are changing in Fedora specifically with Fedora.Next and wanted to meet most of Fedora star contributor face to face. :)

    Arrived on 5th morning to Prague so it gave me good time to get rest and get ready for the first day of flock.

    This flock is organized very nicely with the understanding of number of contributors those are not able to make to conference and we have provided live stream facility and also recording off all the talks. Live stream is available on youtube at [1]

    Keynote was excellent, it was very motivating for contributors with the information about how EU government understand the importance of open source and using it in most of the government places and also contributing to open source. Its recording available at [2]

    After keynote immediately my presentation was scheduled [3], got a nice audience. Recording for my presentation is available at [4].

    Basically i talked on four things, why fons are important, not much happening in Fedora for fonts. I proposed one fonts portal named open source fonts world for gathering all opensource fonts available in different distros. Presenting fonts in better way, more categorized way and prepare some analysis of what is present and what is not. I have done some work earlier and alpha is available at [5]. Feel free to ping me if you are interested in contributing to it. Or if any more ideas..

    I must say there are lots of interesting talk in flock and some are happening parallel, so missed some good talks.

    I attended "Where's Wayland" from Matthias Clasen and yes wayland in Gnome 3.12 :)

    Lunch was nice, though place is 5min walk from conference venue but that is good, Prague is best city for walking. !! Lunch time was bit more than what i expected that is 2 hrs but i think it is good from contributors networking consideration.

    After lunch i attended "Fedora workstation" talk from Christian F.K Schaller and really impressed with the plans for Fedora workstation. One of the point which he mentioned which i hope i understood correctly is taking good input from Fedora marketing team and proceeding as per strategy. With my marketing specialization i am sure this is right strategy as far as we do not understand our target market properly adding new feature will not help much to us. Though its always difficult to get open source community work as per marketing strategy ;)

    Workstation talk recorded available at [6], must watch !!

    Then next was Anish and Mike talked on Predictive text input method (ibus-typing-booster), one nice point came up during question and answer is how can we have prediction during anaconda processing. Yeah that is important for speedy installation. Most of the information for ibus-typing-booster is available AT [7]

    for 4pm to 4.45pm session i took break since i was very tired and had some offline conversations with attendees.

    I attended "Fedora Ambassadors: State of the Union" [8] session from Jiří Eischmann. Understood two topic regarding number of Ambassadors are inactive from long time. APAC did not able to use there whole budget so budget got less in current FY. I do not remember any Fedora 20 release party in India this time. So yeah, people interested in Fedora and want to celebrate Fedora success, want to spread word do come up, we need you. I will definitely do some contribution to Ambassador program this year. We have only one mentor from India that is Kushal. I really like Fedora student University representative program idea, hoping that plan will get into production soon.

    Last talk from Christoph Wickert on "Advocating Fedora.next" was one of the excellent talk and it was housefull. If anyone still not understood Fedora.Next and want some more food for Advocating Fedora.next must watch this talk at [9]

    So had nice and fruitful first day @ flock 2014.


    We had pub party at the end of day and contributors enjoyed lot in it. Competition of tables for consuming highest beer was interesting and Praha-1 rockes with over 56ltr of beer. :-o

    I am sure there are many more things happened than my blog, so do go through other blogs and tweets tagged with #flocktofedora for getting glimpse of it. 

       Cheers !!   

    Note: I started writing this blog on first day but due to packed day, not able to complete it and publishing it on Day 3 :)

1. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQIXiF6fxPCtHw_XwHFq6nA
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBpXpnQKjIs&list=UUQIXiF6fxPCtHw_XwHFq6nA
3. http://t.co/Rpo2Hhgn0k
4. https://t.co/4DqJAcdDKF
5. http://osfw-i18n.rhcloud.com/
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYtJZBgOrKw&list=UUQIXiF6fxPCtHw_XwHFq6nA
7. http://typingbooster.org/
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iv2G_u3xKY&list=UUQIXiF6fxPCtHw_XwHFq6nA
9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2O1bMT5a5Y&list=UUQIXiF6fxPCtHw_XwHFq6nA

All is set for attending Flock 2014 conference !!

    Almost 2 months, when i started planning to attend flock-2014 [1] conference. Had number of hurdle including talk selection, sponsorship for Travel, then VISA issues. Now just 3 days to go for flock and happy that everything is perfectly set for attending conference. I will start my journey tomorrow from India.

    Thanks to Fedora for providing sponsorship for Travel and Accommodation. Specially thanks to Ruth for helping in booking flight tickets. I am going to talk on "Better presentation of Fonts in Fedora". [2] Excited to talk on this interesting topic and have get together with numerous Fedora contributors.

    Schedule of Flock is excellent with added some Fun items.

    Looking forward to meet all attendees in Prague :)



1. http://flocktofedora.com/
2. http://flock2014.sched.org/event/821969dcb62bf1efc76c78f0db6ef44f?iframe=no

Interesting dilemma of Devanagari script fonts

I am sure after reading this post all font developers of well know Devanagari script fonts will start looking at there fonts again and start thinking there font is for which language?

Either they have developed font for Devanagari script or is it font for some specific language or it is simply a mess ?

As most of you know Devanagari script is widely used for number of languages. Major languages in this list are Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Konkani, Sanskrit, Maithili, Kashmiri and Sindhi and some more languages.

Each language has some specific requirements from Devanagari script as follows.

    Characters requirement from Devanagari script block:
        Kashmiri, Marathi, Sindhi and Sanskrit has specific characters defined in Unicode Devanagari code page[1]. This is bit easy to identify, since Unicode has mentioned  it clearly for codepoints.

    Ligatures/Conjuncts requirement from Devanagari script:
        This one is bit tricky and one must go through each language standard documents from Governments or standardization organizations. I would like to mention some important differences here.

        1. Locale specific shapes for Unicode characters

Different shapes of same characters required in particular language.  Few examples of these are in Marathi "ल" (U+0932) and "श" (U+0936) are different than Unicode code block characters, same way Nepali language also has few different shapes for numerals. (Refer Lohit fonts for more information [2])

       2. Different behaviour of conjuncts across language. 

      This one is really painful, since there are not 3-4 but lots of conjuncts characters are different in widely used languages like Hindi and Marathi. Hindi language mostly prefers horizontal ligature (i.e. simply half form of characters) while language like Marathi, Sanskrit requires ligature form of conjunct which is used to be stacked.

After considering above points:
when you see, download or use any Devanagari font, you will definitely start thinking this font is for which language exactly?
Font for Hindi language with horizontal ligatures?
Font for Marathi language with Stacked ligature?
Pan Devanagari fonts supporting all language?
Even though its pan devanagari fonts, what it renders in en_US/en_IN locale?

       Lohit2 is one of the best example of how to handle this effectively. Still it needs some fixes for default behaviour of Lohit Devanagari font. Since Devanagari is widely used for Hindi language, i am in fever of making default behaviour of Lohit Devanagari to match with Hindi language and for other languages one should either download Lohit fonts for specific language (lohit-marathi, lohit-nepali)  or select appropriate locale while using Lohit Devanagari.

      Still question arises if default behaviour matches Hindi then, why it is called Devanagari, but i think answer is since it supporting other languages as well it is called Lohit Devanagari.

1. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0900.pdf
2. https://github.com/pravins/lohit

Lohit2: Next one is Lohit Assamese and Bengali fonts improvement

  In last six month we have completed Devanagari (Marathi and Nepali), Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Malayalam under lohit2 project [1]. We have done significant improvement in these fonts not only from technical perspective but also from standards perspective. I am confident enough to say Lohit follows all standards around fonts and Indian languages and scripts guidelines.

  I attended typoday.in [2] conference in last weekend and talked with people around on lohit2. Happy to see number of people in fonts domain  are aware regarding Lohit fonts. Few people even used Lohit fonts during the workshop to demonstrate some points. Few people proposed enhancement for adding more ligature, so we all are going good :)

  This is time to do improvements in Lohit Assamese and Bengali. Followings are improvements we are looking for..

• Removing not required ligatures.
• Rewriting efficient open type tables.
• Support to the "beng" and "bng2" open type script tags.
• Building fonts through feature file (.fea)
• Following AGL specification syntax.
• Testing on Harfbuzz NG, Uniscribe(W8). 
• Automated Testing Tool utilization
  

    One of the important task prior to development is to identify guidelines, specifications for Assamese and Bengali script. We do have TDIL documents available and will see if there is any other. With these improvements i am sure Lohit Assamese and Bengali can become standard reference font for upcoming Bengali fonts project.


    Need help from Assamese and Bengali language expert. I know few already and will ping them for more input during the developments. Development activity is going to happen in lohit2 [3] git.

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. http://typoday.in/
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2

Review of Kannada fonts released by Karnataka Government

I just did a quick review of fonts released by Karnataka Government [a]. This is not from rendering perspective but from technical aspects of the fonts.

All fonts has following issues:

1. Font is specified as a Serif in PFM family.    Fonts is sans-serif still style is incorrectly given in true type fonts.

2. Version should not contain wording like "Initial Beta release".
    Presently given versions are like:- "1.000 2013 initial Beta release"
    Please refer [b] for version guidelines.

3. Font Embedding Permissions should be more relax.
    Presently it is only Editable embedding. It should Installable fonts so even receiver of document can use it.
    Refer font embedding permissions [c]

4. Incorrect License url
http://shabdalipi.com/ of TTF names not working

5. Some glyphs does not follows AGL guidelines
    Font has some glyph names starts with "_".
    Example: _uni0C96_uni0CCD  there is also glyph name uni0C96_uni0CCD. When two glyphs has same component one should be with name .alternate or .alt
    In above case it should be
    uni0C96_uni0CCD and uni0C96_uni0CCD.alt
    Please refer: [d]
    "If multiple glyphs in a font represent the same character in the Unicode standard, such as "A" and "A.swash," they can be differentiated by using the same base name with different suffixes. The suffix (the part of glyph name that follows the first period) does not participate in the computation of a character sequence. It can be used by font designers to indicate special characteristics of the glyph. The suffix may contain periods or any other permitted characters. For example, small cap "A" could thus be named "uni0041.sc" or "A.sc.""

6. This is not a bug but font contains 1478 glyphs. 
I am sure one can make same quality font with less number of glyphs by using Open type GSUB and GPOS tables.

7. Normal and Bold version of font should have same family name.

Following are the fonts in release tarball
San-Serif

• Kar Chandrashekhara Kambara.ttf 
• Kar Girish Karnad.ttf         (Bold:-  Looks like bold version of Kar Chandrashekhara Kambara.ttf   )
• Kar Puthina.ttf
• Kar Gopalakrishna Adiga.ttf   (Bold: Looks like bold version of Puthina)
• Kar Puchamthe.ttf  
• Kar U R Ananthamurthy.ttf
• Kar K S Narasimhaswamy.ttf  (Bold)
• Kar Maasthi.ttf     (Bold)
• Kar Kuvempu.ttf              (Bold)
• Kar Shivarama Karantha.ttf  (Bold)
• Kar Vi Kru Gokak.ttf  (Bold)

Serif

• Kar Da Raa Bendre.ttf

      Above mentioned bugs should be fix before the purchase and release of the fonts from Government. One should test rendering of these fonts with latest stable version of Harfbuzz-NG included in most of the key projects including Libreoffice, Gnome, Android and so on. These rendering issues must be fixed before the release of the fonts.



a. http://www.karnataka.gov.in/kcit/Downloads/Kannada%20and%20Culture%20Department-Unicode%20Softwares.zip
b. http://semver.org/
c. http://www.adobe.com/products/type/font-licensing/font-embedding-permissions.html
d. http://sourceforge.net/adobe/aglfn/wiki/AGL%20Specification/

Tags: #kannada, #fonts, #agl, #harfbuzz, #opentype

Announcing alpha release of lohit-malayalam 2.91.0 from lohit2 project

   Glad to announce alpha release of lohit-malayalam 2.91.0 from lohit2 project[1]. As we planned earlier [2] indeed this is lightest Malayalam modern script font around with just 214 glyphs and 11 open type table.

    We have done following improvements in Alpha version over the 2.5.4 release.

• Reduced number of glyphs nearly by 25%
  
• Open type Looksup are reduced by 45%
• Supporting mlm2 and mlym specifications.
  
• Testing on Harfbuzz NG and Uniscribe (W8)
• Followed AGL syntax with User friendly glyph names.
• Improved GASP table (grid-fitting)
• TTF build from feature file.
  

    Updated lohit project page [3] for download details. Source tarball link [4], TTF tarball link [5] and webfonts format for Lohit is at [6].

    I would like to say thanks to Ani for her help in testing stuff, Shriramana for reporting important bugs from standard perspective and Sneha for making this happen :)

    As this is alpha release need your help for testing it and making it more perfect. I am still doubtful that we might have missed some important exceptions of Malayalam script so looking forward to fix them in coming releases.

    By next week this release will be available in Fedora 20 and Rawhide.

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. https://www.redhat.com/archives/lohit-devel-list/2013-December/msg00005.html
3. https://fedorahosted.org/lohit
4. https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/o/lohit/lohit-malayalam-2.91.0.tar.gz
5. https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/o/lohit/lohit-malayalam-ttf-2.91.0.tar.gz
6. https://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/o/lohit/lohit-malayalam-web-2.91.0.tar.gz
7. https://github.com/pravins/lohit/issues/new