Lohit Tamil with Embolden transformation

[pravin.d.s at gmail.com]

2011/11/28 Santhosh Thottingal <sthottingal at wikimedia.org>

> Hi,
>
> I spent some amount of time today on learning about hinting and its
> behavior, played with fontforge, compared Lohit Tamil with other Tamil
> and Malayalam fonts which is having not so bad rendering in windows.
>
> Autohinting is not giving expected results for Indic fonts, since they
> are yet to write algorithms for that-
> http://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/
> I checked with Hiran about the possibility of Manual Hinting. He told
> me that , that requires advanced skills in typography and he never
> seen it anybody done for Indic fonts except a typographers work for
> Sinhala.
>

Yes, manual hinting is pain. It takes lots of time.

We need to do it for each character and for each size i.e. 8pt, 10pt, 12pt.

4-5 bugs on liberation fonts hinting is pending from long time, so i need
to dig it some time.


> If we are using upstream Lohit, I understand that we cannot get good
> results. Lohit family fonts are not well tested for Windows
> too(Pravin, Correct me if I am wrong).
>

Yes, windows was never high priority for lohit, but some people use it for
Windows as well though i have not heard anything regarding Lohit Tamil yet.



>
> By studying the behavior of other fonts, I have one solution with me,
> I did an Embolden Transformation on font by 25
> units(http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/Styles.html) and I see that the
> hinting problem is disappeared and font is more good for reading. The
> font is more dark now.
>

Yeah, we need Bold font for each script in Lohit upstream. see bug for
Devanagari https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=648350

But auto bold will not work perfectly, we need some manual intervention by
font designer to make it consistent with Regular Lohit fonts.



>
> Srikanth, Pravin, please confirm this by the screenshots attached. let
> me know if there is any improvement.
>

Definitely image looks better that earlier broken thing.  Let me know once
you applied it.

Regards,
Pravin Satpute
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/i18n/attachments/20111129/a532258f/attachment.html