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.