Monday, March 10, 2014

Lohit2: Next one is Lohit Assamese and Bengali fonts improvement

  In last six month we have completed Devanagari (Marathi and Nepali), Gujarati, Gurmukhi and Malayalam under lohit2 project [1]. We have done significant improvement in these fonts not only from technical perspective but also from standards perspective. I am confident enough to say Lohit follows all standards around fonts and Indian languages and scripts guidelines.

  I attended typoday.in [2] conference in last weekend and talked with people around on lohit2. Happy to see number of people in fonts domain  are aware regarding Lohit fonts. Few people even used Lohit fonts during the workshop to demonstrate some points. Few people proposed enhancement for adding more ligature, so we all are going good :)

  This is time to do improvements in Lohit Assamese and Bengali. Followings are improvements we are looking for..

  • Removing not required ligatures.
  • Rewriting efficient open type tables.
  • Support to the "beng" and "bng2" open type script tags.
  • Building fonts through feature file (.fea)
  • Following AGL specification syntax.
  • Testing on Harfbuzz NG, Uniscribe(W8). 
  • Automated Testing Tool utilization

    One of the important task prior to development is to identify guidelines, specifications for Assamese and Bengali script. We do have TDIL documents available and will see if there is any other. With these improvements i am sure Lohit Assamese and Bengali can become standard reference font for upcoming Bengali fonts project.


    Need help from Assamese and Bengali language expert. I know few already and will ping them for more input during the developments. Development activity is going to happen in lohit2 [3] git.

1. http://pravin-s.blogspot.in/2013/08/project-creating-standard-and-reusable.html
2. http://typoday.in/
3. https://github.com/pravins/lohit2