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