Resolved bug in Rachana font

Just resolved one bug of Rachana font.
Below is list of Malayalam Unicode characters

"ം ഃ ഄ അ ആ ഇ ഈ ഉ ഊ ഋ ഌ ഍ എ ഏ ഐ ഑ ഒ ഓ ഔ ക ഖ ഗ ഘ ങ ച ഛ ജ ഝ ഞ ട ഠ ഡ ഢ ണ ത ഥ ദ ധ ന ഩ പ ഫ ബ ഭ മ യ ര റ ല ള ഴ വ ശ ഷ സ ഹ ഺ ഻ ഼ ഽ ാ ി ീ ു ൂ ൃ ൄ ൅ െ േ ൈ ൉ ൊ ോ ൌ ് ൎ ൏ ൐ ൑ ൒ ൓ ൔ ൕ ൖ ൗ ൘ ൙ ൚ ൛ ൜ ൝ ൞ ൟ ൠ ൡ ൢ ൣ ൤ ൥ ൦ ൧ ൨ ൩ ൪ ൫ ൬ ൭ ൮ ൯ ൰ ൱ ൲ ൳ ൴ ൵ ൶ ൷ ൸ ൹ ൺ ൻ ർ ൽ ൾ ൿ "

Before fix it was looking like, Note, U+00AE character is displayed even at reserved unicode locations, was not understanding from where ® is coming after checking through all font understood in Rachana.ttf these glyphs present.

After Fix

Reported bug : https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=781938
patch is available in bug. Pushed update to Fedora 16 https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/smc-fonts-4.4-7.fc16

Added Bengali language support in Indic typing booster

   Finally done with Bengali support for indic-typing-booster, working from last 5-6 days, actually we could have done this yesterday itself but initially i thought probhat (mostly used in community) is phonetic layout like itrans but later understood it is one-to-one mapping layout. So thought its better if to add phonetic layout as well since mostly new user find phonetic layout more user friendly.

   Hunspell word list made life little bit easy, but its huge wordlist around 3Lakh (.3 Million), not sure how much actually useful for Booster IME. If we can delete few words not related or very similar it can help to reduce Database size. Will discuss this in Bengali community and will take some inputs.

   Unlike first released of other language, from onward User no need to install all layouts rpm together, done sub-packaging in spec file. Users familiar with Probhat should install bengali-typing-booster-probhat, users familiar with inscript should install bengali-typing-booster-inscript and phonetic one should install bengali-typing-booster-phonetic. Considering db size hoping this will help to reduce download and install size. Rpm's are available at koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=3608241, scratch build. Raised Fedora new package request hoping to get quick review and build it for Fedora 17 and Fedora 16
   This is Beta release 0.9.0, with some bugfixes and comment will release 1.0.0 soon.

Wikimedia hackthon 1st day

Amazed with the passion and spirit of wikimedia team during hackthon. Eric gave good starting explanation of basic things of wikimedia and other ongoing activities, such that offline support, mobile support, internationalization.

Hackthon project list was excellent http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011#Topics

I was interested in all but since all activities were parallel thought better to check Lohit fonts support for remaining Indian languages.

I was the leader for font testing activity http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#I18N
Glad to see 4-5 hackthon attendees shown there interest in font testing.

Pre lunch session went in introduction of project, group forming etc. Actual work start after lunch.

first 1 hrs i was just enabling students OS for Indian language, couple of had Fedora in there machine so did it quickly, santhosh helped for enabling Ubuntu for Indian languages.

It was great to see there expression's when they actually started writing in Indian languages. One of attendees (Jatin) father works in CIIL :)

Then explained students important of activity they are going to do, then finally we started.
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/LohitFonts This is the page where finally we put all the testing reports.

In between we had good offline discussion regarding Lohit Tamil fonts, Discussion with Amir regarding on 1 language 2 script problem.

Ended first session with Group Photo  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Hackathon_Mumbai_2011_Groupshot.jpg
 

My 1st day at Wiki conference at Mumbai university

  First thing notices is the security, did not allowed anyone without checking it photo ID and wiki invitation, even inside university there was good security. (Many Police)    

  Later understood this is due to controversy created by BJP http://www.newsreporter.in/bjp-youth-activists-detained-for-protest-against-wikipedia anyway that's other part.     

  From last couple of days seeing excellent coverage by media for wiki conference(even there was new in local Marathi language newspaper Sakal) and same noticed even in conference. First row was mostly occupied by Media.     

  University convocation hall was small compared to COEP Pune conference hall, it proved land/space crunch in Mumbai. ;)    

  Met with Ramki and Santosh and introduction with wikimedia developer. I was interested in attending tech talk session but seminar hall was full, even few people sat on ground. So went outside and had good discussion on indic computing issues and plan for hackthon. Problems and development of Lohit fonts.
     
  Attended Post lunch session about introduction of wikipedia, in that understood wikipedia also facing same problem, we faced 1 year back, one language multiple script, so asked question regarding same in Q&A. I think they are planning good to transliterate language content of one script to another script, so it will save lots of effort and will help people knowing either of language. Since limited time decided to take further discussion offline, so will discuss more in tomorrow's hackthon session.     

  From couple of session i attended wikipedia made it clear regarding there high priority task is to provide fonts, input method for at least 22 official languages of India. It is like providing food. cloth and shelter Only few are missing though, i am working on this from last 1-2 year and my dream to announce sometime "Fedora now support all 22 Indian languages", only 4-5 language support is remaining now major part is testing and confirming the support, so in tomorrow's hackthon planning to highlight this testing points. If any bugs raised i am definitely there to fix. I am sure withing next 5-6 month we will able to announce support for 22 Official Indian languages.
     
  Second part was discussion with the attendees, met with dhananjay Aditya, saw him while discussing regarding adding pali language contents in wikipedia with "Alolita sharma". I am also very interested in doing something for Pali language, we have lots of great Buddhism content available in Pali language and high time to digitize it. Had good discussion with Dhananjay he is very passionate regarding Pali looking forward to work with him together in between Dhananjay is Admin of "Superstition Eradication Committee" http://www.facebook.com/groups/ansindia/ and very active in many activities.           Was interested in showing i18n development, specifically Marathi language to IBN lokmat representative Amruta, gave 5-10 explanation to her. Lets see if anything happen positive for raising awareness of Open Source indic language computing activities.

Fudcon second day

    It was excellent day, unfortunately was not able to attend till last session. Started with the session on Fedora security, it was interesting and definitely fedora user felt proud to see effort of security team.

    My session with Anish was from 2 to 3 PM at seminar hall 2, started bit late since it was experience from first day that audience need some time to change rooms. It was about 20-25 audience but good part was most of them were interested in doing something for Indian language computing.
    Session was very interactive. following questions were raised during session.
    1. Can we add barah layout support? i think yes we can
    2. Since same data used across different users, is there any chance is privacy issues? No. since each user will have separate user db saved in his home folder
    3. is this available in debian? still not need one packager, but still one can install and use it on ubuntu and debian easily since ibus is already there.
    Best part was when in session after showing demo and architecture we asked regarding Advantages of Booster ime, audience able to tell its advantages perfectly.
    Sessions slides are available on fudcon.in.
    Outcome: Had good interaction with all. Decided some project to work with students. Looking forward to sometime visit COEP again and actually work on some task with student.        
Thanks fudcon for giving me this opportunity.

Excellent first day at Funcon 11 in Pune!!

    Jared smith gave excellent talk on Fedora and motivated lot to student to come forward and start contribution. He explain just using in not means contribution to community but one should come forward and report bugs give some feedback is taken very well.
    Saw many desktop powered by Fedora 15, gnome 3 :)
    Amit shah's session on git was very interactive and i think it was required some more time but yes he managed well in available time.
    Had a small running chat with Jared smith, briefed him on Fedora indic i18n activities and number of Indian languages and script. (Lohit fonts). Will be good if tomorrow get some time i can show some demos to him.
    Met with Prof Abhijit (COEP) was interested in meeting him from long time. He is great supported and promoter of opensource. I had meeting with some of his project student working on Gnome Terminal indic rendering stuff. Had a nice talk on indic language computing project. There is still lots of things to do and that also interesting for Computer science student. Will give show project demos and plan for some project tomorrow.
     Big news came after lunch with the Inauguration of fuel website, it is done by Satish Mohan. There are many open task for student do go through it if one wants to learn and contribute in opensource.
    Attended talk Vaidik kapoor's on how development of Fudcon.in  happened Case study was great and overall excellent work in limited time. I am sure we will do great next time and can use same experience for other such events. COD with Drupal is really excellent module for developing event website. Liked this session.
    Last talk of Aman was nice, He explained Fedora QA process very nicely. Still i think there need some motivation for students to test and reports bugs for Fedora. May be in Fedora new somewhere name regarding the person name with number of bugs he reported.
    My session is tomorrow and very excited about it.

Pravin Satpute
Fedora i18n team

Soon bodo (brx_IN) locale will be available in glibc

few days back saw note on tdil-dc.in regarding submission on Bodo language locale in Unicode CLDR.

found it www.unicode.org/cldr/trac/browser/trunk/common/main/brx.xml

bug for glibc http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13282

Sanjib Narzary and me working on this. Hoping soon glibc will push in in upstream git repo

Nastaleeq script font now available in Fedora

  Just completed packaging of Urdu Arabic script fonts from CRULP for Fedora. Good news is now Fedora has fonts for Nastaleeq script as well.
  Following is its view with Harfbuzz NG

  Looks good to me, might be person belonging to Arabic script can comment more on same.

   Following are the name of packages added to Fedora.

nafees-naskh-fonts-2.01-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-nastaleeq-fonts-1.02-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-tehreer-naskh-fonts-1.0-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-riqa-fonts-1.0-2.fc15.noarch
nafees-pakistani-naskh-fonts-2.01-2.fc15.noarch

  cheers..

Indic internationalization new developments and improvement in Fedora 15 (Lovelock)

   Fedora 15 (Lovelock)  got release with excellent Gnome shell. I liked gnome-shell so much that i have started using it after F15 Beta release itself ;)
   I am writing some of the noticeable development and improvement specially from indic internationalization point of view in F15.

1) New Indian Rupee Symbol

    Jul 15, 2010 Govt. of India announced about New INR symbol, http://blog.foradian.com/ made a mess by adding it on non-standard (on ) codepoint in excitement.

 During Fedora 15 Development cycle Unicode approved U+20B9 to New INR symbol and it is available in Unicode 6.0 (i guess quickest one in Unicode history thanks to DIT)

 On Qwerty keyboard AltGr+4 (Right Alt Key) allocated to it.

 Now Fedora 15 supports it and most importantly with Standardize way !!

Question: How to use it?

Ans: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/RupeeSign#How_To_Test

2) Indic Typing Booster

     This is predictive text input method for Indian languages, presently it supports Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati with itrans and Inscript layout. (Other languages will get supported soon)

    Though this is in Alpha stage it has great potential and presently in active development stage. Do give a try to this.
    Screencast of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTYNVP7p-xY

3) New Fonts packages:

i) pagul-fonts:
    A TrueType Font, which allows you to read and write in Saurashtra Script.

 ii) tabish-eeyek-fonts:

    A TrueType Font, which allows you to read and write in Meetei Mayek script.

Note: Pagul and tabish both are in Fedora 15 testing repo, install it with
$sudo yum install --enablerepo=updates-testing  pagul-fonts tabish-eeyek-fonts

 iii) nhn-nanum-fonts:

    Nanum fonts are collection of commonly-used Myeongjo and Gothic Korean font families, designed by Sandoll Communication and Fontrix. The publisher is NHN Corporation.

 iv) nhn-nanum-gothic-coding-fonts:

    Nanum Gothic Coding fonts are set of Gothic Korean font faces suitable for source code editing, designed by Sandoll Communication and published by NHN Corporation.

 v) thai-arundina-fonts:

    Arundina fonts were created aiming at Bitstream Vera / Dejavu compatibility, under SIPA's initiation. They were then further modified by TLWG for certain aspects, such as Latin glyph size compatibility and OpenType conformance.

3) Indic Rendering Improvement:

Lohit Devanagari Release 2.4.5:

          Added new ligature द्ध्र्य , Resolved shirorekha problem ग्मि, Customized glyphs for Nepali with locl feature (First indic fonts to have 'locl' feature implemented)

QT/Pango:

    Fixed most of the qt/harfbuzz indic rendering issues, In pango smaller improvement in Backspace processing for some indic characters.

4) Language Support

   i) Kashmiri

         a) select kashmiri keyboard layout from ibus-preferences (Kashmiri->inscript)

         b) Lohit Devanagari supports Kashmiri Characters recently added in Unicode 6.0

        People who made this possible http://pravin-s.blogspot.com/2011/04/fedora-15-support-kashmiri-language.html

   ii)  Sindhi

     a) select kashmiri keyboard layout from ibus-preferences (Sindhi->inscript)
     b) Lohit Devanagari supports Sindhi Characters

5) bharati-m17n

    bharati is an enhancement to input method based on Inscript layout and implements unique transformation rule of deleting on the fly the previous dependent vowel for Indic languages.

6) Packages Latest Version:

Liberation Fonts:
Added U+040D and U+0400 for Bulgarian language.

For Font Developers:

glyphtracer-1.3-1.fc15 (Glyphtracer takes an image of letters. It detects all letter forms and allows the user to tag them.  They are then vectorised and passed on to Fontforge for fine tuning.)

IBus Sayura 1.3.1 release. (The Sayura engine for IBus platform. It provides Sinhala input method.)

In this mostly writing indic related stuff but considering overall for i18n there are lots of things available in Fedora 15, so enjoy Fedora 15 with excellent and very useful i18n updates as well !!

Fedora 15 support Kashmiri language using Devanagari Script !!!!!!!!

This is really excellent feeling, it was 2007 when we first identified problems with Kashmiri Devanagari

1. Few key Matras (U+0956, U+0957) and corresponding vowels (U+0976, U+0977) were missing in Unicode (Now available from Unicode 6.0)
2. localedata was not available for Kashmiri Devanagari (http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6856)
3. Not much knowledge on how to deal with issues of One language multiple script in glibc locale (using lang@script )
4. No Fonts supporting Kashmiri  (Now its Lohit)
5. No Keymaps (ks-inscript.mim)

    Finally today i can say that all these issues are resolved and one can type kashmiri words without any problem.

    It took long time though but standardization is time consuming process :(. most of the time taken in proposal acceptance by Unicode.

    Thanks to all who supported this, specifically from , Department of Information Technology (Swarn Lata Madam, Director & HoD, TDIL Programme and Manoj Jain) also from community M.K. Raina, Raman Kaul and Rakesh Pandit. I really appreciate effort done by Mr. M.K Raina in Kashmiri language. We used those as a reference in standardization process.

    Kashmiri Devanagari community will be happy to know Fedora 15 support Kashmiri Devanagari, Now one can see kashmiri content, create Kashmiri content in Fedora. This all in standardize way with Unicode.

    Surely this will boost kashmiri localization activities.

84 Marathi Sahitya Sammelan (Literature Meet)

    Attended Marathi Sahitya Sammelan yesterday (27-12-2010) to meet and talk with people who create lots of content in Marathi Language in Thane. Following are the observations.

1) There is lots of content/books available in Marathi language, This covers almost  all the topics.  As compare to Last years Pune Sahitya Sammelan, In thane very few software/web development stall was available.

2) Digitization of these books is necessary activity, but due to cost of digitization
most of the books are still not digitized. I think OCR will be very helpful in this case.

3) Mostly people used InDesign on Windows for books, and they are still using 8-bit (non Unicode) fonts for it.

4) There was presentation about Unicode on Sunday and i missed it :(, While talking with some people i understood it covered most of the topic like how to enable Marathi on Windows, Linux. Enabling windows on Marathi shown with practical but Linux was not shown. Good thing is now users are aware of word Unicode but i think there is some misconceptions about it, people covers so many things under the name of Unicode ;)

5) I got one handout, it was about how to enable Marathi on windows and Ubuntu 9.10. for Ubuntu 9.10 it was about Installing Marathi Language support and selecting keyboard from Keyboard Preferences Tab (XIM)
In Fedora 14, Now there is no need to select even keyboard layout as well for your language, just select your language while log-in in GDM, ibus will auto detect your layout for your language, and by default it will enable all.

No one aware about this, i updated them about this and hopefully in there next release they will update notes about fedora as well.

6) I had a chat with Marathi Abhyas Kendra on recent development in Fedora i.e Updated in Lohit, Keyboards, Enhanced Inscript. One good point was they are Planning to host competition for Marathi font deigning i really appreciated that and agreed to give full support for same. Even today we do not have much active community around font development hopefully with such event people will be aware of font development process and start contributing.

Attended some talks on Marathi Libraries problems and possible improvements. One speaker (sorry forgotten name :() said agree that each person cant by iPAD/digital book reader but might be we can keep 5-10 ipad in each library and let people use them in library. this will be also a good start. He mentioned about Amazon.com that they not only sell soft copies but also courier the hard copies of book on demand as well.

The best thing i heard was he said don't give anything free to users, if we give it free user's does not value it well, always charge at least some/very little fee for same.

Attended one traditional dance event as well.

With respect to fedora
We are doing so much development for end-users/community, but sad to say very few are aware about it. Users are living in there own world. We should really start to do some event for people, who are developing contents in regional language, let them aware about to latest development happening in language technology. Try to bring them back from Windows proprietary world to open source collaborative world of Linux Fedora. I will be very happy to see  and contribute to such events. I talked with some people on how we can reach these users and answer was to media/new papers/press conference are the best way to let them know what are the available stuffs.

Looks like lohit is first open source indic font to support locale feature

I was just checking is there any other open source indic fonts, supporting locl opentype feature, but i did not found any other.

In Lohit now we have locl feature, so we have added locale specific shapes for Nepali Language.

One can test this by Typing "क्र" in gedit or in firefox, open this file with firefox ro gedit in ne_NP locale and see same with any other locale as well.

One can easily observe shape difference. There are some difference in uses of Devanagari in each language, will be good if we get some document about this  difference we will happy to implement it in lohit.

problem not able to open office format 2007 in office 2003

    This problem can always happen, i.e. we sent document in one format and person cant able to use/open it. So i suggest all please use open format whose specification are open and any operating system developer can easily add support for it.

     We can always use .pdf format it is open and any person receive it, no need to by Windows Operating System or MS Office just to open it. If we use .pdf it can be open on Linux, Mac and in Windows as well and even most of the smart phone now has ability to open pdf.

    Alternatively use openoffice (OpenSource office suite) it is available for Windwos, Linux and Mac as well. It uses open format like .odt. Its storage specification are open and any application can easily add support to open it without paying anyone any royalty.  Unlike .doc is proprietary format its specification are not open so no office suite can offer to open it, and with hack to .doc they cant give proper support for .doc.

    Communication standards must be always open without dependencies on particular company's format, Think for a language we speak, if we need to pay royalty to some company for each word of language we speak then what will happen?  .doc is Microsoft proprietary format.

    Might be it will difficult for people to switch to openoffice, but atleast everyone can use feature provided in openoffice, i.e. export to pdf. So you can open your document, export it to pdf and then send it via mail.  (http://download.openoffice.org/)


"www is open standards that why we can open any html page with any internet browser or any application on any OS. Anyone can implement it as it is open standard"
"At least we can start with  using pdf for communication"

looks like history is repeating itself!!

looks like history is repeating again the same way Microsoft took most market share, since they were just providing Software and  most of the hardware use that and increased their market share and Apple was pushing there excellent software with Hardware. At the End Microsoft won.

Now same way Goggle is providing only Android OS and all the Manufacturer using this OS (Sony, Samsung, HTC, Dell) so their market share is increasing very fast, On the Other Hand iPhone and Nokia pushing client for OS with Hardware. I think it is hard time to think them for their strategy for more market penetration or competing with Android.

Android shares are increasing

Fedora 14 boot from USB/Pen drive is great one to move windows user to Fedora for at least 10 to 20 minutes minimum

    USB Pen Drives are cheaper now days 1/2 GB cost something around 200/300 rupees, and every computer users now at least have one with them. So this feature has a good number of potential users.

     In past i have met many windows users, they like Fedora lot and even want to try it. But the main problem they are facing is how they can do it on there existing windows system. And options were dual bit (risk of data loss and need to install on existing harddisk), Virtualization ( but it does not give food speed) so both has some problem. Even if i wanna do this for them is very time consuming and that why even though i am interested not got a much time to do this for them.

    But now its excellent time i can just burn live ISO to there pen-drive and then they can use and even demonstrate excellent Fedora to other. The best thing even after burning ISO to pendrive we can still use it as a storage for other required file, it will not affect its booting stuff.

    Here i would like to suggest fedora users, always keep Fedora-Live iso on your machine, and whenever any windows user get interested in Fedora do give him his own Fedora OS with him he can play.

    One improvement is possible here to make one fedora live iso with openoffice (libreoffice) as well, yes agree it has limitation since one cant burn it on CD due to size limitation, but it has scope for use on PenDrive since size now days 1GB and more so one can easily use that. I am making this point since if we wanna stick new user some more time in Fedora live OS then he need officesuite as well for playing.

worked on Meera font today!! (waiting harfbuzz very eagarly)

finally resolved (at least with my testing) Meera Fonts bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=616324

ohh, what a day!!
was trying to resolve this problem
initially thought it will be easier one, just will increase kern for U+0d4d characters, and whenever it will followed by U+200C in will just make it kern to minus.
mine test cases are
1) ക്  (U0d15 U0d4d) should leave proper space, when it will be last character of word (presently chandrakala/virama is getting cut)
2) ക്‌ക (U0d15 U0d4d U200c U0d15) when virama/chadrakala will be followed by 200c it should use present kern to get form in word

so tried first dist feature first,
1) increased kern of U+0d4d and
2) added pair positioning for "U+0d4d  ZWNJ" with dist flag kerning
was working well when i was debugging in fonts but failed when was testing with pango :(

next try was
then added ligature and was trying to bring that ligature when someone type
Cons + 0d4d + 200C
but again it failed in pango :(
tested same in Open Office and it was working there fine, with some more trial understood that pango is not considering 200c for contextual comparison
so writing rule i.e when U+0d4c is preceded by ZWNJ will not work in pango

next try
since it was need to increase kern of virama only when it will be last character of word,
and luckily while trying contextual feature found {Everything Else} group, so used this one
and it worked perfectly in pango :)
but again problem, it was not working in oowriter

so added both 2nd and third solution in font for making it work with oowriter and gnome
link for
1) scratch build is available on http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2353995
2) modified source file is @ http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/Meera.sfd
3) binary file for testing @ http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/Meera.ttf
4) patch: http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/bug-616324.patch   

dont know how dream of harfbuzz will come true, and will make font engineers life easy

New Released Liberation Fonts!!

Just done 1.06.0 release of Liberation Fonts.

Highlights are:
1) New family added to Liberation-Narrow Fonts (Thanks to Herbert Duerr for contributions)

2) Some changes from releasing side

Now releasing source tar ball as well, so if someone want to build from source can use this tar ball.

If someone want to direct use ttf file, he can download Binary(ttf) tarball, and use it directly.

Added TODO list as well for next release :)

1) resolving bug related with hinting
    - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=606217
    - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=591556
2) shape improvement
    - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=591559
    - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=487581
3) Ascent Descent Values Improvement
    - using absolute values instead of relative values in OS/2 table
4) RFE: Add Greek Polytonic support to Liberation fonts
    - need some volunteer to add these shapes
    - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=473842

 really reproducing these hinting bugs is big task for me

Will build it for fedora tomorrow

Added New Indian Rupee symbol — INR to Lohit Devanagari

Friday saw the news on new symbol for INR, i felt really happy since the prevoious one U+20A8 ₨ was based on latin shortname for Rupees, and never it was looking like symbol. Just capital R and small S combination.

That's why it was really less in use, and many people were not aware of this. While checking in locale i found this one only used in en_IN locale. Other locale were using locale initial for rupees. i.e in Marathi and Hindi रु. was used for currency symbol. Same for Other language in there own script.

Standardization is really favourite topic of mine and really with this one we can standardize INR symbol.


Now all developers are waiting to get Unique Code Point for this symbol. i.e Unicode Value. We have for all other currency symbols see http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U20A0.pdf

I am strongly recommend to add this symbol also on same Unicode code page.

in excitement /me also added this characters in lohit devanagari fonts and committed to upstream svn :)

Since no Unicode values is assigned to this, there is no standard for typing or storing this character.

I just added so if any person want to give reference to this symbol can easily use lohit fonts and do so

I have added this character on U+E000, which is unicode private user area.

So anyone want to type and use this characters just enter U+E000 with any method you know or ask me here :)

This is private use area so we can use this for any general purpose, please note when we will get actual value we just need to replace U+E000 with the new unicode value, thats it

I saw some people http://blog.foradian.com/ added new INR symbol on ` location, but this is one kind of unicode spoofing.

Since in actual storage you are going to store ` (U+0060) and whenever you want to type ` character you will only get new INR symbol.


So this is wrong thing and i recommend to use some private user area location, so it will not conflict with existing Unicode Encoding Standard

Download Lohit Font with addition of new INR symbol at U+E000

for more information about Lohit project see  see https://fedorahosted.org/lohit/

Recent fixes to hi.remignton mim file

This is just update regarding the Typewriter Remington keyboard for Devanagari,
2-3 months back there was request on OT list regarding problems they are facing while using Remington keyboard, and they were shifting to windows just due to this.
http://mm.glug-bom.org/pipermail/linuxers/Week-of-Mon-20100329/069909.html

"Please tell me how to type "आप" using regington keyboard
Also, in window, I use to type  "shift h  + k + w +  [ + k  " for writing Bhookh भूख
But in Linux Fedora + IBUS + Remington, I HAVE to type
"shift h  + backspace + w +  [ + backspace "
This is giving us a lot of un-comfort and our whole organization is migrating on windows again just because of this problem."

when me and parag tested same got to know that this was happening since Remington keyboard mim file was written in one-to-one key mapping and there was no intelligence for handling these things. And one need to learn new things while migrating from typewriter to Computer typing.

Parag worked on it, and presently it is in good shape, and same is now available in upstream :)
just file a bug against fedora, so now it will be now available default to user from Fedora 13 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=591810

I think it will be good if people listen from such mailing list and report bugs to appropriate package, so person related with it can work and fix it quickly.

Updates on W3C conference, May 6-7

It was really good experience to attend w3c conference (http://w3cindia.in/conf-site/conference-index.htm) . Most of the people including Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe, CEO W3C were present at the conference, representative's from Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat (me), Opera and many were there.

Hats of to Ms. Swaran Lata madam (Head TDIL Prog.,DIT & Country Manager, W3C India Office) the way she handled two day conference by listening everyone and assuring action from W3C India Office and from TDIL. There were presentations on research topic's.
The main research topics were

1) Web Accessibility for Disable (Dr. Mohan Dewan made a good point saying able vs disable. He said "disable" is not the good word it should be "differently able", Ms. Shilpi Kapoor made to attention on there are many people who need's improvement from accessibility perspective example given like many people have specs, also there are large number of people can't here properly in some extent. etc.)

2) Web For mobile is also one, and there is limitation on screen resolution when accessing web. Idea of having different web sites as per device is really bad. Also there was suggestion i.e. it will be good if there some kind of mechanism so that server will understand clients resolution/device type and deliver web site in that form to client.

3) WAV: Voice Access to Web Information for Masses , Dr. Om Deshmukh, IBM India. suggested there are lots of challenges in this area. and need some standardization.

I presented on need for standardization and issues related to Unicode in conference.
Standardization: Web should be render same,  no matter what browser of what Operating System. It need some standard guideline from language and script perspective.

And need for free and opensource basic components for 22 Official Indian  Languages, and TDIL or W3C should start a portal for same, it should be done in open source way. May be we can add basic components for M$ and Apple Mac as well there.

Since Inaugural Session took long time in first days as ministers were late due to some other activity. Technical Session got a very minimum time. I was expected 20 min. for my session but got only 12-13 min. So could not able to give demo. of UTRRS and Unicode Issues. But after presentation got some good comments from audience so i think my message got delivered well in small time.

Really chair person's had a hard time to finish all speaker's talk within a given specific time ;)

I think there will be now different meeting/discussion from W3C India office as per topic and interested people, as W3C involves in lot of different things.

from Left Me, Mr Klaus Birkenbihl (W3C Offices Head), Dr. Somnath Chandra (Scientist-D)
from Right Dr. Phil Archer (W3C Mobile Lead),   Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe (CEO W3C), Dr. Richard Ishida (W3C Internationalization Head), Ms. Swaran Lata madam

brisbane visit (first post)

better to right this now since i think there are many more going to come

what's a lengthy travelling from Mumbai to Brisbane,
it took almost 31 hour for me from Mumbai to here Brisbane
i leave Mumbai on 6th Friday 1pm and reach here in Brisbane on 8 morning 10am (IST 5:30am)

though hospitality was good in emirates

now i really feel we should have taken route Mumbai-Singapore-Brisbane instead of Mumbai-Dubai-Brisbane.
but still some +ve point were
Dubai airport was excellent, its so huge and so many things around
lucky we got a good time to rest in Spring Hill Apt. on Sunday.

umm bit ok with food, but not very good though
i guess will need try some indian food restuarant...

Note: posting bit late, i came to Brisbane 8th Nov

FUEL @ CDAC GIST on 31st Jul and 1st Aug

What a nice two days on discussing FUEL (frequently used entries for localization) for Marathi, problem is "though Marathi is my mother tongue i don't use all the Marathi words regularly"
in fact i found that almost, may be more that 50% words of Marathi i never use in my day to day conversation.

It revised lots of my Marathi words.

It was event i attended ever on Marathi, i found Marathi language is so rich in words.

I think translating words from English to Marathi looks like very much one-to-many mapping like thing

example:

in English we use one word at many location and meaning keeps on changing but

in Marathi even for same thing we have different word according situation

smell can be good or bad

in Marathi it can be
good smell = सुवास/सुगंध
bad smell = वास / दुर्गंध

at so many location we found this diversity and then finally decided to do by actual context of word :)

the one thing "Clean Up by Name" is nothing but sort according name so we used corresponding word for Marathi

we didn't took a big risk of translating into word which 90% of Marathi people will not understand and may be they will need to see in dictionary what this Marathi word exactly mean.

so we preferred to do transliteration instead of translation since these English word are so widely used by people that keeping them as it is will help people lot.

example: setting
even people in 1st class also say sometime setting ;)

We had a really difficult time in translating some words like:
Buddy Pounces, scenarios, detective, control, autotext and anchor.

Though there is corresponding word available in dictionary, but it should satisfy context as well, that was the main problem.

But finally we completed whole FUEL list on second Day.

thanks to GIST ,CDAC and specially Mr. Mahesh Kulkarni for coordination and off course Sandip Shedmake for his patience in listening all attendees suggestion.

some snaps:

Still gcalctool not allowing indic numerals

presently gcalctool not supporting indic numerals, but i think it will nice if we enable it for indic digit also, so if someone entered indic numerals for calculating it should do a calculations and display a result in indic numerals.
I googled for this but didn't found any topic related this.
now i dont know complexity involve in doing this, but as far as i think it will just require conversion from Indic numerals to Latin numerals and vice versa. When somebody enters any expression and if it contains indic numerals it will convert it to latin, then processing as usual and then while display result it will do same thing back.

Task:
1) understading gcalctool code
2) utf-8 to unicode conversion
3) validation for indic numerals
4) converting to latin before processing
5) converting result back to indic after processing
6) unciode to utf-8

thats it

hope so there is no any standard not allowing doing this thing :), i will talk with upstream for this lets see

facing problem while using Policykit for user authentication

I am trying to use policykit in system-config-language for authentication, so thought lets try with some test application

while doing so i am following steps given in murrayc

everything is going well
****************************************************
def write_file():
fp = open('/etc/fonts/fonts.conf', 'a')
fp.write("i have wrote")
fp.close


if __name__ == "__main__":
print "calling wrtie file"


#Call the D-Bus method to request PolicyKit authorization:
session_bus = dbus.SessionBus()
policykit = session_bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.PolicyKit.AuthenticationAgent', '/')
if(policykit == None):
print("Error: Could not get PolicyKit D-Bus Interface\n")
granted = policykit.ObtainAuthorization("test.org.gnome.lirc-properties.mechanism.configure", (dbus.UInt32)(0), (dbus.UInt32)(os.getpid()))

print granted


if granted:
write_file()
else:
print "no access"
****************************************************

in my code after calling

granted = policykit.ObtainAuthorization("test.org.gnome.lirc-properties.mechanism.configure", (dbus.UInt32)(0), (dbus.UInt32)(os.getpid()))

it is asking me for root password as per i stated in .policy file, but after entering root password, in next line when i am trying to update /etc/fonts/conf.d, it is not allowing me to do that :(

i dont know even after entering root password from policykit why my code is not able to edit above file

my all file are here
policykit

still trying for this, thought lets share it

Malayalam Collation is now in glibc upstream

yesterday Ulrich upstreamed ml_IN collation patch

2008 nice year of Indic computing as we started targeting collation for Indic Languages in glibc,
starting point was Ulrich Drepper's India visit for foss.in 2008, he pointed out in his speech still there lots of work to do for Indic Languages in glibc
for collation and iconv
I started some work initially, studied already implemented things such that collation tables for ta_IN and as_IN, community event Indic Mashup in Pune helped lot, in that event almost all Languages LM were present and got a good input to start work

started collation with Devanagari mostly used script in India, then one bye one,
GUJARATI
TELUGU
GURUMUKHI
KANNADA
SINHALA
MALAYALAM

we have got a good community, they really worked very fast for this, for Sinhala and Malayalam harshula and santhosh completely wrote collation table i just reviewed and tested them.

so its really nice thing happen for Indic languages

now
we can see all menus for particular languages in sorted order,
also we can easily sort any long list using sort function provided by glibc and quickly search required item,
also like the way we search our required file in huge docs folder pressing initials of name, same thing now we can do for our language(i was missing that lot)

Fedora 10 already has support for most of the collation, now Fedora 11 will have support for Malayalam Collation also

collation table for above languages/script are available at glibc upstream

the only one remaining now is Bengali collation, Bug
hope so things for that also get sorted quickly and we can say now Linux support sorting for all Indic Languages :)

thanks to all contributed in this and special thanks to Ulrich for all support :)
cheers

now easily install ttf/otf fonts in fedora 10 using kfontview (kfontinst)

today i was trying to read news from http://onlinenews.lokmat.com, but it is using custom encoding font so i downloaded it..

I was planning to install it using regular mkfontdir, fc-cache command but was feeling bit lazy to do that..
just thinking can i just install it using just one click and yes now we can do that.

kfontview is now have that feature.

Just right click on any .ttf font file and open with kfontview

It will show you characters in fonts and also there is install buttton (It will be disables in font already installed ) just click on that, now restart your application in which you want to see same font and its d one

I am still remembering those days when windows user were calling me only for installing font for testing it in there Linux machine, It is very good for them now they can easily install and test font without any help :)

I think gnome-font-viewer is now disabled.

photofunia good one!!

today saw photos of my friends in some nice frames, tried photofunia
and its really funny

It quickly add you snap in nice frame, it uses face detection technology for doing this
some more of mine available at
http://picasaweb.google.co.in/pravin.d.s/Photo_funia#

for trying it visit photofunia.com :)

Gone through some things @ foss.in second day!!

Freeway is an advanced Open Source eCommerce platform which can sell using methods only previously available in enterprise class or niche bespoke systems.
http://www.openfreeway.org/

attended talk on OLPC,
It need more opensource contributors from india..

Talepathy..
http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/
Its really nice application, though i have not used yet but on tablet like nokia 810 its great application..
one can do chat, talk, video conferencing and many thing..


Nice to see Sun- Virtualbox and VMWare's stall in front of each other

1st day at foss.in:

first day started with registration and initial talk of Atul Chitnis telling the basics of foss, and what the means of "Talk is Cheap, show me the code"..

Also had a face to face meet with many opensource contributors meeting mostly on IRC

as we(Me and Rahul Bhalerao) had a talk on very first day in afternoon session, initially it was planned at 5pm but in final schedule it was at 2pm, so we mostly concentrate on our talk,

there was good audience in our talk, something around 100 and more, with majority of student..

and got a good response from some Tibetan students looking for there language to be recognize from OS point of view...

Also some people shows there concerns about Open Type Specs 1.6 and Its imact on present font rendering..

Got a good feedback on the way we covered all the i18n architecture in one shot..

Samyak Devanagari is now Unicode 5.1 compatible!!!

All new characters added in Unicode 5.0, Unicode 5.1 are now in Samyak-Devanagari, now Samyak Devanagari fully support to Marathi, Hindi, Sindhi, Urdu, Maithili, Limbu and Konkani languages

Characters added are as follows U+0972 [ॲ], U+0971 [ॱ], U+097B[ॻ], U+097C[ॼ], U+097D[ॽ], U+097E[ॾ] and U+097F[ॿ]

Now no problem for writing ॲ[u0972] as previously people were typing अॅ [u0905+ u0945] but now ॲ is in Unicode as well as Samyak-Devanagari too

You can download and test samyak-fonts-1.2.1.tar.gz from http://sarovar.org/frs/?group_id=461
I think it will be in tomorrow fedora rawhide as well samyak-fonts-devanagari-1.2.1-1

Python tricks:

I was creating locale file for Sindhi using Arabic script, since locale file consist hex code of all characters and i got strings from linguist.
It was really very time consuming to check each character in Unicode code page and write its Unicode value, may be there some other good method but i followed this for sd_IN@Devanagari locale file since i am very familiar with Devanagari script.
but Arabic code page is very confusing, since Arabic words contains init, mid, final form of the characters, and Unicode chart contains standalone shape.
but from sometime i am working with python and tried following quick method:
In terminal
/******************************************/
$python
>>> w = 'شريمتي'
>>> w.decode("utf8")
u'\u0634\u0631\u064a\u0645\u062a\u064a'
/******************************************/
did same thing for almost 30 strings
so fast and accurate it is :)
whenever you will confuse with Unicode characters, just do this thing and directly check character information using Unicode value in chart.

Shortcut method for testing new locale file with glibc in Fedora

I had some discussion on Indlinux list about testing newly locale file/collation with glibc but that time i didn't no the short cut method, i was building glibc with changes and then testing it, it was taking long time. :(
Had a discussion with Ulrich Drepper on this and he suggested good tips on testing locale/collation in 10 minutes, so sharing with all :)

step 1:
- make a new folder

step 2:
- copy the locale file there
ex: cp mr_IN to NEW_FOLDER/mr (note i have changed name of locale file)

step 3:
- edit mr (do changes you want example you can add collation info etc)

step 4:
- run following command
$localedef -i ./mr -f UTF-8 ./mr_IN
that's it.
It will create new folder mr_IN with all locale information

step 5:
- for testing with these new changes locally, use following command
*make sure you are in new folder created in first step
LOCPATH=$PWD LC_ALL=mr_IN date

step 6:
for adding this into archive permanently use following command
need to be root
root$ localedef --add-to-archive mr_IN

Proposal for additional Deprecated Characters from Unicode

0953 ( ॓ ) DEVANAGARI GRAVE ACCENT
0954 ( ॔ ) DEVANAGARI ACUTE ACCENT

I saw this earlier but just remembered when i saw pango renders U+0953 and U+0954 characters as independent vowel even though they are dependant(dont know what is exact problem).

Unicode Public Review issue 122 dated 2008-08-04, has proposed these two characters as deprecated.
http://www.unicode.org/review/pr-122.html

As a devanagari script user i have never used these in my writing, but i think these two characters are added specifically for vedic.

Naneghat Rappelling

zoom it too see people doing rappelling



one nice view...


Naneghat Rappelling
(click on image to see it in full size)

I did Naneghat rappelling last week, it was very nice experience, Naneghat is 2800ft height form Sea Level and i did rappelling from top 2800ft to 2500ft , 300ft rappelling.
In life 1st time i was doing rappelling but organizers were very experienced and they gave good confidence initially also rappelling trail for 30ft. It boosted my confident.
Finally done it with lots of doubt in mind should i or should i not, but it was awesome experience and very few people gets such experience and i am one of them :)
This camp included moonlight trekking also, unfortunately we were late to reach at Naneghat base (expected 1am but we reached at 3am) but we got at least 1 1/2 hrs of moon light trekking.
Reason for reaching late was driver was drunk heavily and he was not able to drive bus, we stopped bus immediately and called his manager luckily he gave us new driver at 1am that's why we able to reach there, otherwise it was almost cancel.
when we reached to the top of Naneghat we got breakfast, Tea and then choice of either go for Jivdhan Trek first or Rappelling first but we were excited for rappelling and we did that first.
then one nice sleep then back to pune.
When from different view we saw other people's doing rappelling, we cant believed we done that..
Camp was form Sat 11pm to Sun 9pm included Tea, Break Fast, Lunch and evening snacks and all this is in Just for 1400rs.
some snaps:

ready for rappelling with instructor and all safety instrument

Me with Naneghat while watching rappelling of other people

dont know which script is this, but something was written there in Cave

with friends afte completing trek

Me while trekking


Naneghat view from base at 4:30am

Adding language support in Fedora

Lets say we want to add xy_XY language support in Fedora

Following is to do list for adding language support in Fedora from i18n point of view

1) Open Type, Unicode Based Font for xy_XY

2) Rendering Engine support for Unicode code points of xy_XY (pango, qt)

3) Some Basic IME's for xy_XY(m17n-db)

4) Locale File for xy_XY in glibc

5) Updating comps file for xy_XY

6) Adding xy_XY in GDM list

7) Updating s-c-l locale-list file for xy_XY

might be something missing but these are the major things

Kashmiri Draft for Unicode Proposal

link for draft

http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/Draft_Kashmiri_Proposal.pdf

many many thanks for this draft to
Mr. M.K. Raina
Mr. Raman Kaul
and
Mr. Rakesh Pandit

without there valuable input it was never possible to do research on Kashmiri language also to www.koshur.org site almost everything is available there

I have contacted Michael Everson from Unicode for this
and he is happy with this and going to add proposal form to this draft

I hope soon it will get included in Unicode Devanagari Plane

Google Translation tool: (My First Look)

Just saw today google translation tool, nice to see effort they have done for hindi-to-english and english-to-hindi
http://www.google.com/translate_t
playing with it just 5 min gave me following results:

While doing from Hindi-to-english
i/p: तुम कौन हो -> What you have
expected result: who are you
i/p: मे घर जा रहा हु -> Hu is in the home ->
expected result: I am going home

While doing from english-to-Hindi
i/p: who are you -> आप जो कर रहे हैं
expected result: तुम कौन हो
i/p: go away -> दूर
expected result:दूर जा

so i found its accuracy something around 20-30% for sentence. It is good for single word.

while speaking about translation from english-hindi and hindi-english is really very tough job, since
1. For single english word there are lots of hindi words available so its really difficult for tool to understand, It need manual editing for improving accuracy.

2. Meaning of words keeps on changing according to statement while changing from english to hindi

3. Structure of sentence, if you observe carefully, 'is' 'was' comes in the middle of english sentence same translated things comes in the last part of hindi sentence.

4. Determining sex of sentence is a tedious task
Statement "I am going" this statement have two forms depending upon who actually speaking it
male "मे जा रहा हु" Female : "मे जा रही हु"
This can be achieve only if we know who is actually speaking it from previous statements else we need manual editing.

5. Most Important thing it need strong dictionary in the background for all these comparisons and should have all possibles words for particular word.

Good to see google tried it, some more work will definitely improve it lot!!!

Including smc-fonts package(Malayalam fonts) in Fedora 9.

I really found it useful to write here since i think its nice to see many Malayalam typefaces/fonts in Fedora 9 now. so now Malayalam users not need to install these fonts manually they can easily just do

yum install smc-fonts-*

they will get these fonts in Fedora 9

Its really worth to write here, since it was really difficult adding this package in Fedora, since there was lots of issue in this package as per (FPG)Fedora packaging guideline. and i am happy that finally i done required adjustments and finally it is in Fedora 9.

Issues:
1) There was license inside fonts but not easily viewable, person should have fontforge or any other font tool to actually see that license

2) Then i got detached Licensed text from upstream in this tar ball but it not solved the problem
since this package consist fonts from different upstream project all with different License.
and as per FPG we cant make a single package having different license inside it.

3) Its really nice, alternative options is given there for almost all the situation in FPG, i studied all these things from the expertise, and finally added sub packaging support in smc-fonts and then kept it for review. Thanks to FPG for good documentation.

4) thanks to Rahul Bhalerao who actually done review for this very complex packaging example, since it was not regular package it was package with different license and different upstream versions.

you can see bug for more details
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=433584

as per review suggestions i modified it and finally Jens Peterson gave cvs access and now smc-fonts is in Fedora 9.
cheers for that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Presently i am fedora downstream maintainer of smc-fonts package it includes fonts "meera, rachana, raghumalayalam, dyuthi and suruma"

if you found any bug in these fonts feel free to file it at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/enter_bug.cgi?product=Fedora

difference between malayalam fonts lohit and meera

here just mentioning things i notices in between these two fonts
1) both are mono thick fonts shapes are almost same
you can see the image(fontforge metrics window) below for checking shape difference, its almost null

meera fonts shapes looks bit thicker than lohit

2) this difference i noticed while comparing two fonts in open office

meera really needs some work on this, since if we set this font in GUI application at 8-9 size it is unreadable. Even if we check its point size with other Latin fonts it is very smaller almost half than other fonts.

3) the major difference is meera support traditional script whereas lohit is following new script, so you need to choose right font according to your script need.

yeah, there are possibility of some rendering differences, bugs as they are depends upon GSUB rules of fonts and underlying rendering engine, it is not in the scope of this blog.

Steps to test glibc sorting order of any locale

In indic-mashup we had a good discussion on sorting orders and issues of sorting of indic languages. All language experts posted thers expected data on
http://www.indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/CollationData

I have recenlty completed work for mr_IN and it is upstreamed also and now you can check sorting of mr_IN in next glibc releases

just blogging this here since it will be useful for many linguist to test sorting order for there languages and it will be nice if we can test and correct sorting order of all languages. :)
so first step to do this is test sorting and file bugs for wrong sorting order ;) as i am working on collation from some time i will surely help in fixing that

step 1: create text file for ex: barakhadi_test
step 2: write sorting data into such that each sorting syllable on one line

so content of your test file will be like this
http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/sorting/barakhadi_test

step 3: use following command in terminal
syntax : LC_ALL="locale name".utf8 sort "path/test file name"

for marathi case it will be
LC_ALL=mr_IN.utf8 sort test.sort

it will give you output as sorted data each syllable per line in terminal

if you want to write sorted data in some file just add following line instead of above

syntax : LC_ALL="locale name".utf8 sort "path/test file name" > output_file
LC_ALL=mr_IN.utf8 sort barakhadi_test > barakhadi_sorted

http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/sorting/barakhadi_sorted

there are also some other way to test but i have mentioned here method i am using to test

How to test Open Type Fonts

Font is very important part of Operating system and 100% accuracy of that is very important.

Though i am not from QA background but after more than three years of working in this rendering issues field i have seen many varieties of font problems. I am writing some of area where we should look while testing fonts. This is just some guidelines please suggest me if any you can.

Steps:
1. Cross check font with Unicode chart:

This is very important step, use tool like character map in Fedora, charmap in windows. These tools show you glyphs in font and corresponding Unicode value. Just check this with Unicode code chart www.unicode.org/charts. There is chances of wrong Unicode value assignment to glyph and also possibility of missing important Unicode characters. Please check the Unicode version font supporting so it will be nice to check particularly with same version of Unicode chart.

2. Create a test file for your language:

The content of this file should be all possible syllables of language, say for marathi it will be barakhadi(combination of all consonant+ matras). It should also contain some conjuncts form ex. matra ligatures, consonant ligatures. Making this file is really big effort but doing so once will help you forever for testing fonts. I think there should be some available for some script already. So please surf net.

I will really appreciate people from community if they have such file please submit that file it will help lots to others peoples also.

So when you testing any new font for your language just apply that font to this file and check whether it is working properly or not. In case of any doubt you can refer to all ready available accurate font for cross checking.

Problems of this file can be, since you are not actually typing the characters, there are chances of source file might have typed using wrong typing sequence. Since we are just viewing that we cant be sure what person has entered while typing it. So i suggest please in case any doubt type actually that character sequence.

Example: Once i took some data from esakal.com for testing but some characters were not rendering properly, letter on i understood there data entry operators are typing ZWJ in many unnecessary places also(almost every places where half form's of consonant comes).

3. Problems of rasterizer:

Many times it happens, due to problem of hinting rasterizer shows some wrong GPOS attachments. In this case please increase the font size and check, else just take a printout of this doc and check.

I have noticed this problem while working of nastalliq script font, cursive attachment is key point of nastalliq script and on screen it was showing break in cursive attachment but in GPOS rules of font and in print paper it was showing properly, so it was problem from rasterizer side.

4. Compatibility Issues:

This is major problem of Open Type Fonts. Open Type Fonts gsub rules give different results according to rendering engine's reordering methodology.
So even though our test file gives nice results on gedit, it might not give same results on kwrite/openoffice since they use different rendering engine.
It will not give 100% different behavior but there are chances of some bugs. So please dont forget to do this.

5. Font Styles: (Normal, Italic, Bolt and Bold Italic etc)

check is it possible to apply all styles to font (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)
I have seen this problem while creating Arabic fonts, even though after installing for weights of fonts(N, I, B and BI). When i was trying to see actually effect it was not showing me style variations. After digging into it i understood some problem of .fog(source file) file setting. I was not updating name of TTF names field.

Testing styles is very difficult task since many editor give inbuilt support for italics, bold. So checking the glyph we are watching, is from Italic font or is this default italic given by editor is very important. I was doing so by taking printout :).
First take printout of default italic given by Editor. Then Install Italic weight of Font take printout. Now compare things will give you exact results.


6. Fonts internal name:

Whenever we double click on any True Type Font it shows us its name, license information etc. In gnome it is gnome-font-viewer, in windows windows-font-viewer these viewer shows this information.
Testing this thing is also very important. Since this is the name we identify while selecting font in various editors(OO, gedit etc).
So test is this font-name shows as expected in Editor. ex. 'samyak devanagari' while selecting font in menubar.

7. Selecting Font:

Actually applying font to text. Some time editors don't allow us to do this. I have see this problem with Ms Office. After installing a font it was not allowing me select one from list.
The problem in this case is unicode bits in OS/2 are not set properly for script.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/ulu.htm
Fontforge and Fontlab font editors do this, just we need to select required script. But people who are still using Fontographer need to give this by writing Hexa value for that script range.

8. Printing Quality:

Shapes we see on screen are result of hinting, anti-aliasing and some more processing of rasterizer also screen-resolution also effects on it.
Check by taking printout: It will shows how font looks in printed material, might be you can suggest some modification in glyphs.
Yes definitely we should check this with different kind of printer dot-matrix, laser, inkjet. It actually tell you the printing quality of your font :)
That's why you can seen many varieties of font today for different media(display, print etc)


please don't forget to mention version off all application with OS name while filing bug. Also if you are giving key name of ASCII keyboard, please mention which keyboard layout you are using ex. inscript, phonetic etc

Temporary Solutions for Kashmiri Problems

* All things in this blog is for Kashmiri devanagari only
Kashmiri Standardise in 2002 in CIIL by Shri. RK Bhat, but it is very sad still they don't got additional required code point in unicode devanagari code page u+0900. I have seen www.koshur.org on this website there is lots of content available for kashmiri, basic of kashmiri, its sounds and using only these resources given in this website anybody can learn kashmiri. Going through this website person will definitely understand in unicode devanagari codepage we need additional code points for kashmiri for sounds û & ü.

Then what is reason Unicode is still not supporting kashmiri fully??
Actually earlier community people discussed with unicode, but the thing is kashmri required vowel sound û & ü are little bit same like Gurumukhi vowels u & uu, so unicode suggested to use that else, propose the same to unicode.
But that solutions has may problems , since first thing is gurumukhi shape is different than require.
and there is lots of other problems from rendering and font side. Since if we type Gurumukhi matra u+0a42 in side Devanagari text it identifies it as punjabi language syllable, recognizing as invalid syllable
and through u+25cc mark in between devanagari character and gurumukhi matra. And dont gives the required combination.
The using matras of gurumukhi will not solve the problems since corresponding vowels signs also required.

Presently for Translation work i am putting these shapes at location u+e500, u+e501, u+e502 and u+e503 in lohit and samyak fonts. Yes i know it is wrong since data getting created using these code-points will be not standardize but no option because unicode thing will take long time and we cant stop our work, so as soon as we will get code-point in unicode we will use converter or replace these with proper value.


added first character of above image on Inscript V , Third character on B
Second & Fourth Character on # & $ key


become root user
1.take backup of font - copy /usr/share/fonts/lohit-hindi/
and
2. paste http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/kashmiri_temp/lohit_hi.ttf this font at same location
3. take back-up of mim file /usr/share/m17n/hi-inscript.mim
4. paste this file http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/kashmiri_temp/hi-inscript.mim at same location

just logoff and u can now type kashmiri using key #, $ and V and B

Presenting in National Workshop on Calligraphy and Typography

It was a very big Workshop cum Seminaar on Calligraphy and Typography organised by GIST, CDAC Pune. All masters in this subject were present in this Workshop. The good thing was Calligrapher as well as Technical/ Font Engineer were present. My topic was OpenTypeFonts and Some Case Studies.