Re: [Freebangfont-devel] Reworking Mukti

[Deepayan Sarkar]

[Sorry, sent an incomplete reply by mistake earlier]

On Friday 09 May 2003 07:12 am, Anirban Mitra wrote:
> Hi All,
> When I first saw Mukti Fonts in Linux platform I found it to be
> quiet a mess. The reph-raphalaa problem could not be solved by
> tweaking the vtp in VOLT. 

Actually it can. The whole problem is due to an undocumented feature in VOLT 
(I think) which Uniscribe works around (or else there's a bug in freetype). 
In the Mukti ttf files, the order of the lookups rphf and blwf are reversed. 
Freetype tries to do them in the given order and messes things up. MS' engine 
probably ignores the given order and does it the way they say it should be 
done. I don't know what they opentype specs say.

The actual order in the font produced by VOLT seems to depend on the order of 
the susbstituitions in the middle column.

There's also another problem, which is that one particular substitution is 
included in two separate lookups. I don't think this is a big problem, but I 
haven't actually tested, and it should be fixed.

Anyway, I did fix both these a couple of days back for one of the fonts (Mukti 
Regular), and it seems to work fine. I was planning to do some more tests 
before saying anything, but it would be great if you could take this up.

I have the following files at

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~deepayan/Bengali/FreeBangTemplate/

-rw-r-----    1 deepayan deepayan    99189 May  9 10:36 muktimod.zip
-rw-r--r-x    1 deepayan deepayan   355884 May  9 10:21 MuktiRegular.ttf
-rw-r--r-x    1 deepayan deepayan    89836 May  9 10:22 Mukti.ttf

The last one is the font shipped by VOLT (without VOLT tables), and
can be used by others (on both Windows and Linux) to test if it
works. MuktiRegular.ttf contains the VOLT data as well. Since it's a
little big, that same file is zipped as muktimod.zip. You should be able to 
see the changes I made there. I should have exported a copy of the .vtp file, 
but I forgot.

Let me know if you need anything more (or any of my statements above
turn out to be wrong :)

Deepayan