This is an RFC for the design of a proposed template font for the Free
Bangla Font project (the idea being that this would be as complete as
possible in terms of coverage, so that others can easily create new
fonts by simply replacing these glyphs by their own glyphs, with no or
very little tweaking of the opentype stuff).
See http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/bengalot/default.htm
for microsoft's thoughts on bengali opentype fonts
1. Should we have glyphs for ASCII and Latin-1 ? Punctuation marks ?
- We have to deal with lots of unnecessary glyphs
+ If we don't, we would only be able to use the fonts in software
that has a font fallback mechanism, and even then there's no
guarantee that the combination would look good
2. List of juktakshars
We need to decide what would constitute 'complete coverage'. The
best we have at this point is the file juktolist.txt that comes
with Lekho. Alternatives ?
3. Akhands
Microsoft mentions something called akhands which I don't really
understand the need for. Should we have akhands ? If so, which ?
(My preference would be to drop them altogether.)
4. Naming conventions
We need to be careful with this as this will not be easily changed
in future.
This has 2 parts to it, first how to name the Unicode codepoints,
and second, how to name the combinations.
For the unicode points, here's an initial suggestion (in unicode order):
#####################################
chandrabindu
anusvara
bisarga
a aa i ii u uu ri li e ai o au
ka kha ga gha nga
cha chha ja jha nya
Ta Tha Da Dha Na
ta tha da dha na
pa pha ba bha ma
ya ra la
sha Sha sa ha
nukta
aakaar
ikaar
iikaar
ukaar
uukaar
rikaar
rrikaar
ekaar
aikaar
okaar
aukaar
hasanta
auMark (shouldn't be needed anywhere)
Ra
Rha
Ya
rri
lli
likaar
llikaar
shunya
ek
dui
tin
chaar
paanch
chhoi
saat
aat
noi
asamiba
asamira
(anyone know appropriate names for these ?)
takamark
takasign (?)
currency1
currency2
currency3
currency4
currency1less
currency16
isshar
#######################################
Proposed rules for combining names:
all combinations should be separated by an underscore (_).
Consonants, unless they are the last component of a combination,
should have their trailing 'a' stripped.
e.g.
k_Sha
k_Sh_Na
n_ya
d_ukaar
n_d_ukaar
h_rikaar
Half forms should be called
half_ka
half_kha etc
nukta forms should be kalled
k_nukta
kh_nukta etc
halant forms should be called
k_hasanta
kh_hasanta etc
5. Any other aspects I have missed ?
- Deepayan
_______________________________________________
Freebangfont-Devel mailing list
address@hidden
http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freebangfont-devel