Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Points on Open source language summit 2013 second day

As my first tweet in the morning said, this is lohitise and ibus-typing-booster day
 we indeed had great day around this project.

Lohit-ising fonts:

Demonstrated lohit-ise concept with Samyak Devanagari fonts due to time restriction we only modified the single combination of Samyak Devanagari but i hope that was sufficient for understanding concept.

I hope Sneha [1] will do further blogging with nice images on how we actually done this demonstration. Steps are already available on my earlier blog.[2]

Looking forward this to make good impact on some of the available fonts around. But i think still people will take time understanding usefulness of this. So we need to provide clear details on what things got improved and how it will help in longterm after lohit-ising fonts.

Ibus typing booster [3]
This project is around now for 2+ years and number of feature developed considering users requirement.
Anish started nicely with the need behind this project with me presenting on feature of typing booster.

Thanks a lot to Vasudev again for trying installing ibus-typing-booster on Debian. I am hoping he liked the project and will give some more inputs and contribute more.

I tried last two time test day of itb and this is first time when all participants appreciated project and said the need of more intense testing of this may be for couple of hours. This is really motivating.

I am setting up project page for it.

1. http://snehakore.blogspot.in/
2. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/11/how-to-lohit-ise-open-type-fonts-not.html
3. https://fedorahosted.org/ibus-typing-booster

How to Lohit-ise open type fonts not updated or new development

These are steps we followed in session for lohitising open type fonts.

1. git clone https://github.com/pravins/lohit
2. cd (devanagari or malayalam etc as per your fonts script requirement)
3. cp "yourfont.ttf" .
4. yourfont.ttf open with fontforge and save as a yourfont.sfd
5. open yourfonts .sfd and update glyphs names as per lohit fonts.
6. python ../scripts/apply_featurefile.py yourfont.sfd Lohit-.fea  

   Things to note here apply_featurefile.py only import gsub of lohit project, it will keep gpos tables intact.

There are number of benefits of lohitising open type fonts, i will write separate blog on it with proper implementation example.

Monday, November 18, 2013

First day of language summit and things achieved.

It was good day considering the plans i did before the start of summit 2013. [1]
Lohit2 Development session:
  •  Started with explaining basic idea behind Lohit2 project.
  • Next we had excellent discussion again on Adobe Glyph Names. I am sure i made concept very clear but still there are some plus and minuses with AGL. In the next conference around Typography i am surely would love to talk in details regarding it.
  • Aravinda [2] explained his blog wrote on lohit2 kannada and gubbi and navilu font development. 
    • I loved his idea for having script for generating AGL based names from user friendly name. 
    • In long term if we can have such script useful for building .sfd to .ttf and automatically all fonts build with fontforge will become AGL compliant.
  • Sneha explained on steps followed to develop Devanagaria ang Gujarati. These steps are very helpful as we are going to follow same for all other script fonts. I hope sneha would like to blog about same with more details.
  • Santhosh exaplined Gsoc project for automatically testing fonts rendering. 
    • Earlier i had different perspective on this project. Since We are already following test suite in Harfbuzz developed by Behdad.
    • Here first step is different. i.e. font developer suppose to create correct combination standard file. Then we will pass unicode text to hb-shape and compate o/p with out standard file.
    • This project is font specific on the other hand Harfbuzz is not font specific but assumes fonts work perfect on Uniscribe (This assumption is correct since font used for testing were validated and heavily tested on Uniscribe)
  • Done some plans for future development and done.
  • I liked some of the attendees shown interest for how they can resuse Lohit2 open type table. going to explain it in tomorrow session with implementing concept on Samyak fonts, so stay tuned :)
Font packaging session:
This session was good, as i think first time Fedora and Debian package were in front and discussing how we can improve. It was good to have me, Parag, Karthik and VasudevK here.

Thanks VasudevK [8] for creating track request [3] for packing ibus-typing-booster in Debain. I am sure after learning about this project more Debian users will request for having itb in Debian.

As per planned me and Parag packaged SakalMarathi [4], tharlon-fonts[5], phetsarath-fonts [6], tuladha-jejeg-fonts [7]

  Looking forward to attend Behdad's session on Harfbuzz via Google Hangout.
 

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/11/things-i-am-expecting-from-open-source.html
2. https://aravindavk.in/blog/improving-kannada-fonts/
3. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=729851
4. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031569
5. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031587
6. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031588
7. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1031603
8. https://twitter.com/copyninja_

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Things i am expecting from the open source lang summit 2013

Hi,

  Almost start of the open source lang summit 2013. I think this is good time to list down things i am expecting from this summit.

  If you had chance to gone through my earlier blog [1] on the sprints plan for this summit, you might be already know the activities i was planning.

  Happy that all my sprint plans are got accepted and excited to work on it.

Fonts

Day 2
  1. (Sprint 1 )
- Lohit2
    - Hacking Telugu and Kannada Open type table
Telugu does not looks possible but i am optimistic for Lohit Kannada2, lets see if we can have at least alpha ready...

    - Testing of Released Devanagari and Gujarati
Devanagari Beta is out last week and Gujarati Alpha is yesterday itself. Hoping we will have some more thorough testing for same.

Day 2
(Sprint 2 )
Just idea presently on how we can use lohit2 reusable tables in long run
- Lohit-ise (Will give small 10min presentation on this)
    - Work on Devanagari and Gujarati fonts

   First of all i need to explain the concept clearly. Once that is done and there will be no doubts, we will try to implement it on Samyak fonts and if contributors are interested will help to implement it on other fonts.

Day 1
(Sprint 3 )
Time to update font packages in major OS distribution. One can learn packaging through this sprints. Expecting experts from different distribution packaging team will be there to help.
- Packaging AnjaliOldLipi,  Meera Tamil and SakalMarathi for Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu

I am sure we will have at least srpm ready for these packages for Fedora. Hoping debian packagers attending here will also able to push up .deb packages.


Input Method 

(Sprint 1)

ibus-typing-booster
    - Packaging for Debian and Ubuntu

 Now sure about this yet. :( So looking around Debian and Ubuntu packagers.
 Porting ibus-typing-booster to fcitx is not required as fcitx following little bit different architecture. Thanks for fcitx main developer for explaination.

 (Sprint 3)

ibus-typing-booster
Presentation and testing event.

I am excited for this. I am damn sure attending will have so much to take out after this sprint.

(Sprint 4)
Plan is to create layout images for inscript2 layout.
- Keyboard Layout Images
    - Porting mapper scripts to support inscript2 layouts
    - Update Fedora wiki images of keyboard layout


Parag is going to lead this session. Looking forward we will have something handy and helpful in this session.

  Welcome to all attendis.

Please ignore typos and grammar mistake ;)

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/10/open-source-language-summit-nov-2013-in.html

Thursday, November 07, 2013

Lohit Devanagari Beta release test file screenshot !!

Lohit Devanagari

Lohit 2 Devanagari Beta is out already[1]. This is screenshot during testing

Testing Environment :
Fedora 19, Application gedit
gnome-shell-3.8.4-2.fc19.x86_64
harfbuzz-0.9.23-1.fc20.x86_64
lohit-devanagari-fonts-2.92.0-1.fc19.noarch
Source file: https://raw.github.com/pravins/lohit/master/devanagari/test-devanagari.txt


Same environment as above
Source file: http://pravins.fedorapeople.org/test-file-devanagari.txt

1. https://www.redhat.com/archives/lohit-devel-list/2013-November/msg00000.html