Emacs support for Indic scripts -- First National Indic-Font Workshop March 2003

[Alex Schroeder]

I've recently joined a mailing list with lots of people from South
Asia on it.  What is the general direction of Emacs support for these
South Asian languages when it comes to fonts and and input methods?
If I hear something interesting that might be of interest to Emacs, do
I post it here?  Is there some other, specific Emacs (Mule?) mailing
list?

Alex.


 To: address@hidden
 From: Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya <address@hidden>
 Date: Tue, 08 Apr 2003 21:31:32 +0530
 Subject: [bytesforall_readers] Action points First National Indic-Font 
Workshop March 2003
 Reply-To: address@hidden

Hi Bytesforall Readers,

Recently First National Indic-Font workshop, was held in Bangalore on 
Indic font issues. The actions points of the workshop are shared here 
with the group. People/organisations who are interested to voluntarily 
join Regional Language Groups being formed and contribute towards 
development of Indic-Computing are welcome. Please see below various 
groups as of now.

regards

vijay

Action points First National Indic-Font Workshop March 2003
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya <address@hidden>

First National Indic-Font workshop, organized by Indic-Computing 
Consortium was held from 28th to 30th March 2003 at PES Institute of 
Technology, Bangalore. The Indic-Computing Consortium is an initiative 
of software developers, businesses and academic institutions to evolve 
appropriate standards, resources and technologies for the 
Indic-Computing community. The Indic-Computing Consortium is designed as 
a national-level participatory organisation that serves as a common 
forum for discussion, information exchange and advocacy on behalf of all 
parties interested in the development of Indic Language Computing.

The workshop second in series was attended by 36 participants from 
various languages & technology groups across India, Nepal & Bangladesh. 
This workshop was an outcome of deliberation held in the first 
Indic-Computing workshop held in September 2002 at Bangalore. One of the 
working groups formed at the first Indic-Computing workshop was for 
development of OTF (OpenType Fonts) & other font related issues, 
encoding, language standardization and representation in international 
consortium. One of the action point and agenda for the group was to 
Hold OTF training workshop for developing major Indic language OTF 
fonts. <http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net>

The idea was to get the community together for:

i. Developing good look fonts
ii. Development of open source tools for rendering and hinting of OTF 
fonts (currently OTF development uses proprietary tools)
iii. Finding font developers for all Indian languages and coordinating 
group for each language
iv. Making available fonts to be converted to OTF

The workshop addressed above issues and others as enclosed in the 
workshop program (please see the website), through presentations, 
discussions & Lab/training sessions over three days. This was the first 
workshop on the subject, while it focused on OTF, it equally shared 
concerns of open standards community and talks, demos and training 
sessions of open source tools, as well as various alternative 
technologies for Indic fonts were done by some of the participants. The 
copyright/patent issue on OTF was also discussed, and concerns of 
community were answered by Mr. Lawrence Liang, (Expert on Cyber Laws) 
with a caution that the topic is debatable and much would be clear after 
the pending case of Adobe in USA courts is decided.

Summary of Three days:

The three days of deliberations included:

1) Introduction to Indic scripts, Character set, tools & Glyph Design, 
Testing glyphs, was given Ravi Pande, Font Designer, who dealt in depth 
on design of glyphs and generating of fonts & on font formats.
2) Encoding & PfaEdit sessions were taken by Karunakar G, Project Leader 
IndLinux.org, Pramod R of Mahiti & Asmita S. Khobragade of HBCSE. 
Karunakar further elaborated on why OTF hold the answer to some of the 
problems of developers as of now.
3) Dr. U B Pavanaja of Vishva Kannada Softech, discussed the OTF issues 
and described the standards, Open Type Tables and VOLT. The use of VOLT 
to develop OTF was demonstrated; during Lab participants used VOLT to 
get a hands on experience of the tool.
4) Arun M of FSF, demonstrated localized Knoppix in Malayalam and also 
discussed on the issues in Malayalam fonts and display of some special 
characters.
5) Amar Gurung, Director, Nepali Font Standardization Project of Madan 
Puraskar Pustakalaya [MPP], Kathmandu, Nepal, shared the problems in 
standardizing Nepali Font the developments done this far. He shared a CD 
on the project status and the work done (The CD content is now part of 
workshop CD distributed to the participants)
6) Mustafa Jabbar, of Ananda Computers, Dhaka, Bangladesh shared his 
work of 15 years in Bangla (Bengali) fonts. He claimed that a low cost 
software application Bijoy which his company has developed has covered 
95% of market in Bangladesh and is much famous in West Bengal, India 
also. He has also designed the Bangla keyboard that is now a default 
keyboard standard for Bangla.
7) Karunakar took sessions on TTX & talked about issues in fonts on 
Linux while Dr. Pavanaja showed digital signing of fonts. Aditya Gokhale 
of CDAC, took session on hinting of fonts.
8) Nagarjuna G of HBCSE, shared his experience of converting TTF fonts 
offered by Akruti to OTF and shared his experiments in using available 
open source tools to achieve good results.
9) IPR (cyber laws) lawyer Lawrence Liang of Alternate Law Forum, 
discussed the crucial and much debated issue of OTF openness 
(copyright/Patent) after understanding the Adobe & Microsoft agreement 
on release of the fonts. While answering concerns of community Lawrence 
cautioned that the topic is debatable and much would be clear after the 
pending case of Adobe in USA courts is decided.

Conclusion:

At the end of the workshop its was proposed to take up the issues that 
have emerged at more depth through regional consultations on each 
language so that focused attention is their and local & regional groups 
also get chance to participate and discuss there issues. We propose to 
take up these Regional Language Workshops in future across different 
parts of India, Nepal & Bangladesh and other regions with languages of 
Indic origin. These workshops would be coordinated by regional language 
groups (see proposed group) and would include training programs and 
technology demonstration sessions besides getting the language community 
together.

Regional Language Working Groups:

It was proposed to take up the initiative for having these regional 
workshops through voluntary and community efforts. An individual 
commitment on part of participants was requested to involve there energy 
in development of these regional groups and also to discuss with these 
respective organization to release atleast two fonts in each language in 
open domain. Many participants gave the commitment to take the 
initiative and also to get their organization involved in the 
initiative. The following Regional Working Groups are proposed (to be 
confirmed), these groups would take initiative and involve other 
regional partners and build common understanding of major issues to be 
discussed in the Regional Workshops. A framework for proposed Regional 
Workshop would be circulated soon for feedback and action by these 
groups. We invite volunteers who would take upon to hold these workshops 
and provide coordination & logistics support and sponsors to contribute 
to development of regional languages. The Indic-Computing Consortium 
would provide necessary technical support and capacity building to these 
regional groups.


Hindi

Ravi Kant, Sarai, New Delhi, <address@hidden>
Maryivan, Sarai, New Delhi <address@hidden>
Niyam Bhusan, New Delhi <address@hidden>
Alok Kumar, Infosys, Bangalore, Karnataka <address@hidden>
S K Anand, Akruti (Cyberscape Multimedia), <address@hidden>
Osama Mazar, 4Cplus, New Delhi, <address@hidden>
Sanjay Gupta, 4Cplus, New Delhi, <address@hidden>

Kannada

Dr. U B Pavanaja, Vishva Kannada Softech, Bangalore 
<address@hidden>
PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore, Karnataka
Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore
C.V. Srinatha Sastry, KGP, Bangalore, <address@hidden>
Arun Sharma <address@hidden>
Bhupesh Koli, BharateeyaOO.o Team, NCST (National Centre for Software 
Technology), Bangalore, <address@hidden>
Shikha G Pillai, BharateeyaOO.o Team, NCST (National Centre for Software 
Technology), Bangalore, <address@hidden>
Abhas Abhinav, DeepRoot Linux, Bangalore, <address@hidden>
Sunil Abraham, Mahiti, Bangalore, <address@hidden>
Pramod R, Mahiti, Bangalore, <address@hidden>

Punjabi

Niyam Bhusan, New Delhi <address@hidden>
Janmeja Johl, Ludhiana, Punjab <address@hidden>
Osama Mazar, 4Cplus, New Delhi, <address@hidden>
Sanjay Gupta, 4Cplus, New Delhi, <address@hidden>

Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri & Persian

Pritam Nahar, Reality Information Systems, Pune, Maharastra 
<address@hidden>
Dr. Tarique Sani <from Nagpur>??
Pakistan  LUG, GLUG ??
Mahesh Kulkarni, CDAC, Pune, Maharastra <address@hidden>
Aditya Gokhale, CDAC, Pune, Maharastra <address@hidden>
Santosh R, CDAC, Pune, Maharastra
Ravi Nankarji, CDAC, Pune, Maharastra

Bengali/Bangala, Assamese & Manipuri

Mustafa Jabbar, Ananda Computers, Dhaka, Bangladesh <address@hidden>
Sayamindu Dasgupta, LUG, Kolkatta, <address@hidden>
Zaheed Hossain, Ananda Computers, Kolkatta,
Ravi Kant, Sarai, New Delhi, <address@hidden>
Bangladesh group of Tani Ahmed, ??

Marathi & Konkani

Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhaba Center for Science & Education, Mumbai 
<address@hidden>
Sunil J. Shetty, Modular Infotech, Pune, <address@hidden>
Mohan Jadav, Modular Infotech, Pune, <address@hidden>
Prakash Advani, Netcore, Mumbai, <address@hidden>
G. Karunakar, Netcore, Mumbai, <address@hidden>
Ravi Pande, Pune, <address@hidden>
Asmita S. Khobragade, Homi Bhaba Center for Science & Education, Mumbai 
<address@hidden>
Frederick Noronha, Bytesforall, Goa <address@hidden>
Kanti Jadia, Micropro Software Solutions, Pune <address@hidden>

Tamil

K. Viveka Nathan, TeNet, IIT Madras, Chennai <address@hidden>
R. Murugapandian, Sudharsanam Centre for Arts & Culture, Pudukkottai, 
Tamil Nadu <address@hidden>
Manoj R Annadurai, Chennai Kavigal, <address@hidden>
Dr. V. Venkataramanan, <http://www.tamillinux.org> ??
International Forum for Information Technology in Tamil, 
http://www.infitt.org/

Telugu

Kiran Chandra, Jana Vignana Vedika, (Prajashakti Daily), Hyderabad, 
<address@hidden>
Atul Negi, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad <address@hidden>
Rajasekharan, NISC India, Hyderabad, <address@hidden>

Gujarati

R. K. Dave, G.A.D, Government of Gujarat, Gandhi Nagar, 
<address@hidden>
Bhavin Choksi, CRAnTI Technologies, Ahmedabad <address@hidden>
Ramesh Patel, SRISTI, Ahmedabad <address@hidden>

Malayalam

Rajkumar S, FSF, Trivendram, <address@hidden> <address@hidden>
Arun M, FSF, Trivendram, <address@hidden>
Osama Mazar, 4Cplus, New Delhi, <address@hidden>
Sanjay Gupta, 4Cplus, New Delhi, <address@hidden>

Nepali

Amar Gurung, Nepali Font Standardization Project, Madan Puraskar 
Pustakalaya [MPP], Kathmandu, Nepal, <address@hidden>
Pawan Chitrakar, Kathmandu, Nepal, <address@hidden>

Oriya

Sashikant, NIIT, Sambhalpur, Orissa, <address@hidden>

Sanskrit


Alok Kumar, Infosys, Bangalore, Karnataka <address@hidden>