[Indic-dev] Updates

[Radhakrishnan CV]

>>>>> "yoga" == yoga  <yoga@math.iisc.ernet.in> writes:

    >> I'm curious to hear from Prof Yogananda about his brave venture
    >> on Kannada fonts with MetaFont.

    yoga> we are at it and giri narayana and co have prepared for a
    yoga> first draft of all the fonts. we now need to consult an
    yoga> artist (we have located him but are looking for funds to pay
    yoga> his proffessional charges!), 

How much it could be? Do you expect a large sum?

    yoga> show the fonts to him and incorporate his suggestions and
    yoga> corrections.

    yoga> we want to comply to unicode standards.

That is great indeed. Creating type1 fonts from MF sources is not a
big deal now. With TeXtrace you can achieve this provided your MF
sources are perfect. Even if it is not as perfect as TeXtrace demands,
we can seek assistance from Karel Piska (cf. 'Translation of MF Indic
fonts into Type1' in TUG2002), who will only be happy to assist, I
guess.

    yoga> also, we would like to take the kannada keyboard into
    yoga> account. any suggestions in this regard are welcome.

Is it not a phonetic keying the best way to go, instead of assigning
glyphs to non-intuitive keys in the roman key board (as CDAC has done,
horrible IMHO).  The learning curve is too steep for it, while
phonetic scheme is intuitive enough which means any novice can key in
his data in his native language very easily. That is what we followed
in Malayalam.

This won't hurt your Unicode scheme in any way.  You may be aware that
the free font 'Keli' of Hashim in Malayalam has been extended to
Unicode as well by Raj by creating OpenType tables, thus making it
available for any unicode aware application.  Further, yudit, the
Unicode editor in Linux which supports many Indic scripts (I guess
yudit supports Kannada too) relies on a phonetic entry scheme.

    yoga> so if things go as we plan we should have a test version
    yoga> ready by the end of december.

Excellent! Look forward to seeing it.

-- 
Radhakrishnan