[Freebangfont-devel] Re: Mukti Narrow Updated

[Deepayan Sarkar]

On Wednesday 10 March 2004 04:14, Omi Azad wrote:
> Friends,
> I have fixed the Kerning problems of Mukti Narrow font. Please check
> this out. The font is presenting itself with an excellent vies. Let me
> know if you find any problem. Deepayan, you have done something magical
> so that your font displays in the UI windows and icons of M$ Windows.
> But I could not manage the same for Mukti or other fonts. Can you please
> share your magic with the other FBF fonts? You told me that there are
> some difference between your TTF and OTF, but I didn't understand that.
> Can you please make me understand what you have done? I'm using the TTF
> as UI font in Windows.

I'm not sure what you mean. What version of Windows is this ? I don't have 
access to Windows right now, so I can't test anything.

Anyway, the only thing I remember not happening in older versions of Likhan 
was that Windows didn't automatically recognize it as a bengali font -- 
e.g., if you go to IE's Tools -> Internet Options -> Fonts and select 
bengali, Likhan wasn't listed. What is happening with Mukti ?

If that's the problem, I think the important difference was adding a GPOS 
table. Another thing I did recently was to add some 'recommended' glyphs 
-- as in 

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otfntdev/glyphs.htm

I don't know if that made a difference.


I think it's high time we recognize a little problem in our development 
model and start thinking about how we could fix it. The only reason I used 
Windows occasionally till last year was because of VOLT. But since pfaedit 
now has reasonably complete support for OT features, I no longer use it. 
The problem is that it's practically impossible to use both VOLT and 
pfaedit. To summarize the problems:

1. VOLT only works with quadratic outlines pfaedit natively 
   works with cubic outlines (it can stick to quadratic, but 
   then editing becomes difficult)

2. In typical MS fashion, VOLT has all this extra (beyond what's 
   stored in the TTF font itself) info that it needs to get the 
   OT information. This means that once I edit some OT features 
   in pfaedit, it's impossible to see those changes in VOLT.

Of course the VOLT UI is nicer to create an initial set of OT lookups, but 
it's horribly difficult to maintain (in fact, I haven't figured out a good 
way not to break everything if you do something as simple as adding a new 
glyph somewhere in between).

On the other hand, pfaedit doesn't have all the tools a professional font 
creator would expect, like hints. (But I think most good font software 
would retain the OT tables created by pfaedit.)


Anyway, the upshot of all this is that it's impossible for someone like me 
(running only pfaedit) to make any changes to Mukti. It's not that I can't 
make any changes, the problem is that any changes I make will not be in a 
form that a VOLT user can use.

This is not a desirable state of affairs, and ideally all fonts in a single 
project like the FBF should have a consistent 'source' form. 

What exactly are the arguments against maintaining Mukti Narrow using 
pfaedit ? (And in fact moving the OT lookups into the 'template' format ?) 
pfaedit has a Windows version, BTW, though it needs the cygwin 
environment.

Deepayan