[Smc-devel] Naming conventions for Indic fonts

[Mahesh T Pai]

Hi all!!

As I was going through my fonts folder, it suddenly stuck me that 
there are no naming conventions for Indic fonts - or are there any?

This would be a real pain, esp (at least for HTML writing) in due 
course - unless we are able to arrive at some consensus about font 
naming conventions.

Of course, I am aware that this was not possible till now due to the 
divergent encoding schemes.  Now that unicode and OpenType standard is 
emerging, it is time that we do something about it.

(Just in case I am not clear, what I mean is this:- in English, I can 
always specify something like font-face="verdana, helvetica, arial 
narrow, arial, sans-serif", and can always predict with reasonable 
accuracy what the user will see on his screen.)

In malayalam, (now) we can specify something like "keli, malotf, 
malayalam"; but this need not be so for other languages, coz. here, 
"malayalam" refers to the font, not the language and in other 
languages, ( for illustraiton we can use 'hindi' - and there is always 
the possiblity that the 'hindi' font uses some proprietary encoding...

Again, some words (eg - karthika) are common - and mean the same - in 
several Indian languages and there is every possibility of different 
people creating different fonts with same names - like for eg - 
'aswini' in Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telegu.  In unicode, this 
would not be a problem, but the user can get confused.

Regards,
Mahesh T Pai.