Tomorrow (9th March) is last day to submit papers (talk, workshop and hackfests) for FUDCon APAC 2015

    Just thought good to write this small blog as a reminder for deadline for CFP submission [1]. We opened up CFP on 9th Feb, its almost one month before closing CFP tomorrow.
    As of now we have got an excellent response from community from paper submission perspective. Still one day to go. From my personnel experience i know lots of submissions happen on last day :)  Expecting few more on last day. Just make sure to think select appropriate category for your sessions. If not sure, go ahead and submit abstract, during screening will try to suggest suitable category.

    We had around 4 weekly meeting during CFP open time and lots of things happened. Some points includes
    1. Logo finalization.
    2. CFP for flyers.
    3. Fedora 21 release party at Venue. [2]
    4. Code of Conduct for conference. [3]
    5. Lots of decision from conference arrangement perspective. Including Food, FedPub and Speakers accommodation.
    6. fudcon.in site improvements.
    7. Reached lots of organization with CFP details.
    These are only few which i remembered, for more details go through piratepad

   

1. http://fudcon.in/call-paper
2. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2015/02/points-on-fedora-21-release-party-at.html
3. http://fudcon.in/code-of-conduct

Points on Fedora 21 release party AT MIT COE pune on 21st Feb 2015

Celebrating Fedora 21 on 21st Feb 2015, last one we did on 21st Dec 2014 :)

Fedora 21 is in itself special release due to Fedora.Next initiative, after merging Fedora core with extra this one is major step moving into future. Fedora 21 is also one special release for India, i do not remember if we had any release party for Fedora 20 in India, please correct if i missed anyone. But for Fedora 21 it is going on and on !!

This was the 3rd release party of Fedora 21 in which i took part. Thanks to Praveen Kumar for initiating this release party. Unfortunately he was away for some personnel work but Rupali came up to help with the organization.

Planned agenda for this meet in quick time with team. We were expecting major chunk of audience from MIT COE itself. Later took permission from MIT COE and decided to open up this for community and started spreading message around.

Shatadru designed nice FLYERS for this release party from the artwork available from Fedora artwork team.

MIT COE is bit far for most of the people staying around Magarpatta city, still we managed to be there in time. Mine talk was first at 10:30 reached there at sharp 10:25 :)

There was one more reason behind this release party was to do preparation for FUDCon happening in 26-28 Jun 2015. See the facility talk with professors, discuss with students educate them on Fedora and clear the doubts.

Me impressed lot with MIT COE campus and it is really live campus. On F21 release party there was already couple of events were going on, students were really busy managing and participating into it. We saw there one stall specifically for Linux quiz.

Due to these other event initially we got very few audience for release party. So we started bit late around 11pm. Later few more students joined. Overall i am happy with the audience since they were few but all were truly interested in event.

There was 3 talks were planned Mine (introduction), Anish (Workstation) and Parag (How to contribute to Fedora) and Later panel discussions.  

During my talk i asked everyone to introduce themselves and inform what they are expecting. There were interesting topics those came up.

1. Difference between Fedora and Ubuntu?
2. Why should i go for Fedora?
3. What is FUDCon?
4. How can we participate in FUDCon
5. What about Embedded systems and Fedora?

Since we were planning for Panel discussion, we thought that will be good time to answer most of the questions.

I did my talk well in time, slides of talk available At slideshare [1]

Then Anish explained about Workstation product feature and target audience for it. Anish also helped audience for better understanding of Free Software and opensource software philosophy. It was good since in F21 release party At Mumbai we found that few people were not clear behind Free software philosophy.

Then Parag talked on How to contribute into Fedora, he explained lots of area's where one can get involved.

 At the end of Parag's talk we made transition from Talk to Panel with Amit and Siddhesh took the lead and later everyone contributed including me, Niranjan, Parag, Rupali and Anish. Panel discussion was awesome and Amit and Siddhesh kept on talking for long and discussed on number of topics. Then we understood that we can keep on talking on Fedora for whole day without break ;) 

 Decided to conclude in panel discussion and start actual celebration with cake cutting. Cake arrived on time with Samosa snacks and TEA :)

We decided to do few more events like Workshop in MIT before the FUDCon 2015. Had meeting with MIT COE principle for FUDCon planning which only some of us attended.
  

Thought its already big blog,i might have missed few things and few names, so feel free to add them in comments :)    

1. http://www.slideshare.net/pravinds/introduction-to-fedora-project-and-fedoranext
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Party_F21_Pune

Updates on Second FudCon 2015 planning meeting

If you still not aware what happened in first meeting. Do go through Praveen Kumars blogpost  [1]

Almost all members available in last meeting were present today as well. It shows there commitment for volunteering and making Fudcon 2015 successful. I am happy and appreciate that.  Few members traveling to devconf tonight still they were present and contributed lot including Amita, Anisha, Huzaifa and Siddharth. Amit was on IRC (From Bruno) and Siddhesh on IRC+Phone.

After the lots of suggestions on fedora-india mailing list [3], in this meeting we decided to have remote participation possible via phone.

I was taking minutes today and it was difficult since lots of things were getting discussed very fastly. Please excuse me if i missed some :)

Agenda was as follows: 

• Website 
• http://fudcon.in website up
• Finalize CfP text  http://piratepad.net/YaC3hNcOZ8
• Graphics status update?
• Praveen K and Siddhesh now know Drupal a bit, so will own the website
• amit can contribute in 2 weeks from now
• More volunteers/mockups welcome!
• SSL support?  Asked Saleem about it    

• Accommodation 
• We negotiated good rates with Cocoon (INR 3000 + taxes)
• Double-occupancy, Free wifi, breakfast

• Travel updates? 
• Marketing 
• Fedora magazine
• LinkedIn group
• https://www.linkedin.com/groups/FUDCon-India-2015-8240994
• Make a list of MLs to post the CfP to
• also reach out to ambassadors in apac for confirmation / planning
• Post CfP link to social media
• Video update?
• appear.in is good for sharing between a few people
• fudcon.fedoraproject.org
• will need some trac ticket?

• Budget 
• Make and maintain a publicly visible sheet to track expenses?
• I think we should have a wiki where we export the sheet in use.  ethercalc lets anyone edit, which is not exactly ideal for a budget-tracking sheet.  For people interested in handling budget, just contact the owner for budget acc. to the wiki
• publicly visible, not editable :) So wiki would be fine

Minutes are as follows: (Bit long)

• http://fudcon.in/ up now !!  (praveenk)
• Presently using 2011 logo
• Siddhesh was working on LOGO with suchakra.  https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/352
• If logo taking time we will go for CFP without LOGO
• (amit) +1 let's not wait for logo for cfp, cfp is more important for travel and budget reasons
• Graphics requirement 
• LOGO (may take one week)
• BADGE (i am going to fudcon)
• Image for slogan ("F for Freedom")
• current one is F for Free, doesn't look right nor good.
• Flyers for CFP (It should have QR-Code)
• We need to create ticket for same. https://fedorahosted.org/design-team/ticket/353 (Shatadru) 
• Once CFP is up we can use it for marketing. (Tweet, Facebook, Linkedin, google+)
• Rough CFP draft @ http://piratepad.net/YaC3hNcOZ8 
• It has two version one for email (bit smaller) and bit broader for web page.
• Email version does not required guidelines.
• We need to have different forms based on session (Talks, Workshop, Hackfest)
• Can take this text for web for now.
• Suggestion: We can have two drop-down (proficiency level and topics categories)
• Prerequisite for attendees. (It can be optional). 
• We have option to upload slide also. Or one can provide link as well.
• Deadline for talk submission 1 month from announcement.
• Marketing 
• Speakers
• Professionals
• Fedora users
• System Administrator
• We can discuss with Kushal, Siddhesh
• Amit's Fedora magazine post is still in pending stage
• We need to list out all location where our CFP should go. 
• Colleges (Shrink, Amita)
• Organizations 
• Opensource organization.
• Please add org list here http://piratepad.net/FudCon-outreach-list  
• For speakers we might be not need to go colleges. Mailing list will be sufficient.
• Social media
• Colleges list
• CFP text to send on respective mailing list. All should have consistent text.
• Volunteers 
• One can add his name on https://www.piratepad.ca/p/FUDConPunePlanning-27-Jan-2015
• Also good if he can ask on #fedora-india (Freenode) or  fedora-india mailing list.
• Hotels 
• Discussion with Cocoon hotel. (3000/night with Breakfast)
• We can have BUS for speakers from Hotel to Venue
• COEP has reached out to us and volunteered to help in whichever way they can.
• FudPub 
• 100  number of participants
• Still looking for location. Should be mostly openspace.
• Please update if any option for FudPub
• Lunch 
• Speakers, volunteers and faculty
• It will be in college. College only support VEG
• Lunch looking for around 150 people.
• Once we will get speaker list and how many we need to pay.
• Outreach: Reach colleges and use flyers. 
• Mobile application 
• lets get v0.1 of the app first with the features described. we can add to it then.
• open source  way
• Should be used in future as well
• good to have it integrated with drupal (COD)
• social wall, for live feeds
• Feedback form (link it to every talk)
• Budget 
• At least presently not looking for any sponsor.
• Will have better picture one we get speakers travel requirement.
• Fedora 21 release party At FudCon venue (MIT) 
• Date is not confirmed yet, but around 3-4 week of Feb
• Interested people do join.

Ohh, that is really lot :) Above information is copied from piratepad for minutes [4] Formating from pad to blog was really pain :(

Let me end blog here. Please note most of the piratepad links are there. Feel free to update it with suggestions or one can always send suggestion on fedora-india mailing list or IRC #fedora-india.

Most of the people from organizing committee are traveling to Brno, Czech Republic for Devconf, so we will not have meeting next week. Hoping we will have CFP ready by this weekend.


1. http://kumar-pravin.blogspot.in/2015/01/first-fudcon-india-planning-meeting.html
2. http://www.devconf.cz/
3. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/india/2015-January/005708.html
4. http://piratepad.net/fudcon-pune-planning-20150203

Lohit Odia 2.91.0 ready for testing under Lohit 2 project

   Started working on this in last month with Shilpa. When initial started working on this script, found it bit difficult. But Odia script is very similar with Devanagari and over the time found comfort with it.

   Shilpa did most of the work and i did verification and fixed few issues. One thing again i noticed during release is using of AFDKO. It is good and we should use AFDKO fully in Lohit project for better quality. Will see if we can do it in long term.

  For now regarding 2.91.0 release. Following are important points:

• Followed Unicode specifications.
  
• Re-writing all GSUB rules.
• Open type rules are available in .fea file for easy re-usability.
• Feature file compiled with AFDKO.
• Supports 'orya' and 'ory2' opentype specifications tag.
  
• Developer friendly glyphs names with AGL syntax format.
• Corrected glyph class for all glyphs. 
• Improved shape of ka-viramasignodia-taodia.
• Added Glyph positioning rules for below based matras.
• Test file available with release tarball.
• Auto testing support with harfbuzz hb-shape.Tested with Harfbuzz and Uniscribe (W8 and XP)

   Update Lohit project page for information regarding download. During release i found few issues which are noted in TODO file. Will fix them before next release. If you find any issue do report on github. Also note TTF file available on my fedorapeople page.

   I remember in FUEL conference i got some improvement suggestions. Couple of them were related to adding Latin to Odia fonts. Presently dont have resource for same but looking forward to solve it in future.

  

Get ready for FudCon 2015, its going to happen in Pune, India.

    Yes, its confirmed now. [1] Took long time though :)

    Excited for this. Recently we organized Fedora release party At Mumbai [3] and i found truly Fedora lover there. One word i said them most probably FudCon will happen in Pune this time and looking forward to see you all there. Its actually going to happen now and time for gathering together. With the power of collaboration and Free and open source technologies making Fedora better and better.

     I have attended FudCon 2011 but only as a speaker and attendee. This time i am one of the member of organizing team. I am sure things will go smother since number of members have experience of FudCon 2011 organization. [2]

    If you are interested in getting involved in FudCon 2015 activities do join fedora-Iindia mailing list and ask on #fedora-india @Freenode if any further queries.

  Cheers !!


1. https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/famsco/2015-January/001666.html
2. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Bid_for_Pune_2015
3. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2014/12/few-points-of-fedora-21-release-party.html

Typoday 2014 At Pune

    This blog was pending on me from long time.  I got a chance to attend typoday.in 2014 conference At Symbiosis International University, Viman Nagar, Pune  in February. This was the my second conference specifically on typography domain after National workshop on calligraphy and typography in 2007.

    It was great to meet typography domain experts and also students with excellent research on different topics.

    I got a chance to meet Kishor Patil (GIST, CDAC), Achyut Palav, Dave Crossland, Girish Dalvi (IITB),  Adam Twardoch (Fontlab), Sarag Kulkarni, Prof.  Santosh Kshirsagar (Sir J. J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai) and Prof. Manohar Desai (Head, Communication Design, Symbiosis Institute of Design).

    We had a good discussion on Devanagari script standardization with Girish Dalvi, Dave and Kishor Patil. There was few improvements suggested in Lohit but as a system default font we cant do certain changes without proper references. Girish pointed out there is already discussion happening At Maharashtra state government and soon something will happen.

    Also Dave shared number of things on his plans for commissioning Devanagari typefaces in coming years. It excited number of typographer around.

    We had expert from Adobe, Fontlab there. There was workshop from Fontlab after the conference specifically for students, i did not attended it due to some other work.

    We also had discussion on Google Noto fonts and Lohit2 project. Overall it was good experience of attending typoday conference.

    There were number of interesting topics but few i noted were "Sensory Experiences in Typography", Matilda A Typeface for Children's with Low Vision. There was number of interesting posters available.

    Looking forward for attending typoday 2015 and learn new things.

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.