New font request: Prepare Lohit Vedic

[pravins]

Original Issue: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=798871

Shriramana Sharma 2012-03-01 12:31:27 IST

Description of problem:

It is very good that Red Hat / Fedora takes steps to update Lohit fonts with latest encoded Indic characters, especially Vedic characters included in Devanagari Extended block. (See https://www.redhat.com/archives/lohit-devel-list/2012-February/msg00011.html)

As a Sanskrit/Vedic scholar I very much welcome this. However, it would be even greater if the separate Vedic characters that are encoded in the Vedic Extensions block (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1CD0.pdf) created in Unicode 5.2 along with Devanagari Extended were also supported.

As Devanagari is the script mainly used for Sanskrit and especially Vedic printings nowadays, it would be best to add the characters initially to the Lohit Devanagari font so that it can combine properly with the Devanagari characters.

If at all there is future demand for the glyphs to be added to the font of another script (like Telugu etc which are also often used for Vedic texts in those areas) the glyphs can easily be copied to those fonts in the future.

OpenType normally cannot join base characters from one font with combining marks from a different font. So a separate Lohit Vedic font with purely Vedic characters is not possible.

As the glyphs from the Vedic Extensions block have very simple shapes, it would hopefully be easy to design those glyphs and add them to the fonts.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

2.5.1

How reproducible:

Install Lohit Devanagari 2.5.1 font.

Actual results:

The Devanagari-specific Vedic characters especially from the Devanagari Extended block are available. The generic Vedic characters from the Vedic Extensions block are not available.

Expected results:

It is desirable to have the generic Vedic characters from the Vedic Extensions block also.

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Comment 1 Pravin Satpute 2012-03-01 12:58:30 IST

Sure, will look forward to this.

Summary: Please add Vedic Extensions to Lohit fonts → [RFP] Please add Vedic Extensions to Lohit fonts
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Comment 2 Shriramana Sharma 2012-03-01 13:59:39 IST

Thanks for your feedback.

I also wanted to note that without the Vedic Extensions characters, even with only the Devanagari Extended characters, it is not possible to completely write the Sama Vedic texts.

This is because the generic Vedic Extensions characters (especially KARSHANA, PRENKHA and SHARA) occur in combination with the Devanagari combining digits in Vedic texts. So we need both Vedic Extensions characters and Devanagari Extended characters to write these texts.

See the original Vedic proposal http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3366.pdf pp 20 21 for samples.

Thanks.

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Comment 3 Pravin Satpute 2012-03-01 14:41:44 IST

(In reply to comment #2)

Thanks for your feedback.

I also wanted to note that without the Vedic Extensions characters, even with
only the Devanagari Extended characters, it is not possible to completely write
the Sama Vedic texts.

That's good, I need one help from you.
Presently we do not have any keyboard layout for inputting Vedic Extensions, have you seen any such? We should create one layout, might be we can append it on existing Devanagari based keyboard, Using AltGr modifier.

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Comment 4 Shriramana Sharma 2012-03-01 16:35:22 IST

Hello thanks for showing interest in this. One gentleman from Russia has made some efforts towards this on Windows platform:

http://siddhanta.svayambhava.org/vaidika.zip (from http://svayambhava.org/index.php/en/fonts)

I am not saying his method should be adopted exactly, but you can have a look at it and we can consider it and develop a method accordingly.

I will also ask a respected for his inputs in this regard.

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Comment 5 Shriramana Sharma 2012-03-01 16:36:49 IST

Hello thanks for showing interest in this. One gentleman from Russia has made some efforts towards this on Windows platform:

http://siddhanta.svayambhava.org/vaidika.zip (from http://svayambhava.org/index.php/en/fonts)

I am not saying his method should be adopted exactly, but you can have a look at it and we can consider it and develop a method accordingly.

I will also ask a respected scholar Dr Peter Scharf of Brown University who has worked on this (http://www.language.brown.edu/Sanskrit/VedicUnicode/) for his inputs in this regard.

Parag Nemade 2012-03-05 14:41:12 IST
Component: lohit-fonts → lohit-devanagari-fonts
Assignee: extras-orphan@fedoraproject.org → psatpute@redhat.com
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Comment 6 Parag Nemade 2012-07-06 18:54:27 IST

Moving to rawhide as new glyphs should go there first.

Version: 16 → rawhide
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Comment 7 Shriramana Sharma 2012-07-07 07:13:21 IST

Created attachment 596703 [details]
Additional glyphs for Vedic Extensions

Hello Pravin (and others).

So I suddenly wanted to finish this off and sat down and hacked for a few hours and this is the result. The attached TTF contains the requisite glyphs.

I will not say that the glyphs are of super-duper quality (I am a Sanskrit scholar, not a professional typographer) but I hope they are acceptable. Especially one fault with some of the glyphs i.e. the ones I had to design using Inkscape and convert, viz 1CD7, 1CE0, 1CE1, 1CE3-1CEC and 1CEE-1CF1, have too many nodes, so if you look at them in the "Show nodes" mode of your font editor they will look horrible (i.e. the cluster of nodes). However, the actual rendering is fine, since the additional nodes are merely the result of stroking in Inkscape and then converting the 3rd order curves to 2nd order in Font Creator.

My additional glyphs are of course my contribution to the Lohit project under the OFL. I have attached the Inkscape SVG and the PDF with stroked glyphs also, under CC-BY-SA FWIW with the provision that resultant font glyphs shall be under the OFL.

I should note that the glyphs by themselves will not be sufficient to get proper rendering, and certainly some intricate smart-font programming and positioning will be necessary to get the actual result, but that is true of the other Vedic characters (i.e. mostly from Devanagari Extended block) already in the Lohit Devanagari font so I left it at that.

Especially note that the non-spacing marks have zero advance width and are themselves horizontally centered at y-axis, and they will certainly have to be repositioned correctly above/below the orthographic syllable to get the correct effect. When I get time, I will sit and do Graphite programming for this, but not now as I have to get other things done.

I hope this contribution is acceptable. Thank you.

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Comment 8 Shriramana Sharma 2012-07-07 07:33:03 IST

BTW I should note that the two characters 1CF8 and 1CF9 are not yet encoded but have been approved and are in the pipeline (http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html) and will be probably published with the next version of Unicode or so. As these are rare use characters I hope there is no problem with including them.

[I may remark that the encoding proposals for 1CF3..1CF6 and the two above chars were authored by yours truly too ;-)]

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Comment 9 Pravin Satpute 2012-07-11 11:24:23 IST

Wow, thats nice.

I am thinking to release Lohit Vedic rather than making Lohit Devanagari to much bulky.

Reasoning behind it

1. Vedic requires extra ascent and descent space. It will increase line spacing.
2. Regular Devanagari users does not required Vedic characters.
3. Having specific font for Vedic will give more flexibility to do changes.

Let me know your opinion on same. Discussion topic on Lohit devel actually.

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Comment 10 Shriramana Sharma 2012-07-11 15:30:00 IST

http://sanskrit1.ccv.brown.edu/tomcat/sl/accents.html has a list of combinations which are expected to render correctly and without overlap of combining marks. Enough testcases I suppose?

[pravins]

Initial work done by Mr.
Vedic-Extensions.zip
Shriramana Sharma

[Shreeshrii]

Pravin,

Any update on this.