प्रविण सातपुते wrote:
2010/1/30 Rahul Bhalerao b.rahul.pm@gmail.com
2010/1/29 प्रविण सातपुते pravin.d.s@gmail.com
Hi All,
I am going to release lohit-Devanagari today, presently we have Marathi, Hindi, Nepali, Maitreya, kashmiri (Dev),Sindhi (Dev) Devanagari script base fonts, and all are same, there was plan to add/modify respective font as per each language requirement but having a super set is no problem and we are following that presently But somehow while discussing more on it, i found it we can use only Devanagari font for all without affecting any language other requirement, and also it will be better for development and maintenance as well. In future if we found that two language with same script, requires different representation of same characters either we can use <LANG> tag of Open Type or We can split font that time as per requirement so to the best of my knowledge there is no problem in using same Devanagari script covering all Unicode characters for all languages using Devanagari script. comment/suggestions are welcome
Before doing that, would you please check if <LANG> tag can be successfully used to distinguish between Marathi and Hindi 'La (ल)', Marathi and Hindi digit '8' on Gnome/KDE. Similarly there would be variations for some Nepali and Kashmiri characters. If possible this would also help solving problems related to traditional and typewriter script of Malayalam.
need to test these things but presently there is no harm in going with lohit-devanagari since all its variant are same but yeah in future development we need to do this. we will try this things soon need to see which rendering engine presently support it may be it will be helpful pointer in development of harfbuzz as well
Instead of releasing single font files for all those languages which use the same script in slightly different variations, you could release a single .ttc file which includes all those fonts, but saves space, since most of the glyphs are the same in all those languages.
If you need help on how to do this, ask me.
Language codes are possible, but most software cannot deal with that.
Cheers Arne