t-om wrote:
Dear Chris,
Thank you for your valuable comments.
On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 12:28 +0000, Christopher Fynn wrote:
1) perhaps you could use a slightly less generic name for the package since there will be other GPL'd OpenType Tibetan fonts - maybe call it "ttf-tibetan-machine-uni" or "ttf-tibetan-thdl-uni" - unless you plan to include all tibetan fonts in one package.
Agreed, in fact it currently is "ttf-tmuni", following an abbreviation found in the THDL deliveries. The intention is to include only the Unicode version of Tibetan Machine font in this package as a way to encourage the usage of Unicode fonts and to keep the package size small. Please let me know if one of your package name suggestions would still be more appropriate. The package is not yet included even in the unofficial distribution so we still have complete freedom to change the name.
"ttf-tmuni" is fine.
Another related issue is that there are a number of older Tibetan ttf fonts floating around which do not have glyphs mapped to the proper Unicode Tibetan characters or have OpenType tables necessary for forming tibetan conjuncts. (There is even an earlier non-Unicode version of the Tibetan Machine font available.) We want to make sure that older (non Unicode) Tibetan fonts which rely on non-standard glyph based Tibetan character encodings are not confused with this font as this could cause all kinds of confusion & problems for users.
I am not aware of other official Debian packages with tibetan fonts included, yudit excluded. As ttf-tmuni will be an independent package I think it will be on users's responsibility to solve compatibility problems caused by his/her custom font installations. I will include your warning in the documentation of the package.
Other Tibetan fonts would only be 8-bit for non UTF-8 environments. However there is no standardized encoding for Tibetan or Dzongkha other than Unicode. Other "legacy" Tibetan fonts all use glyph based encodings which are different from font to font.
There is a Tibetan font available with m17n-lib - the font itself is non-Unicode but m17n-lib can use an external table to map between Unicode
Tibetan and the glyphs in that font to display
2) the current version of THDL's Tibetan Machine Unicode font is an alpha version with known limitations. None of these is disastrous but the font currently won't render as nicely as it should and quite a few of the rarer Tibetan-Sanskrit ligatures are not yet supported.
We plan to release a more up-to-date (beta) version of the font with these things fixed in about a month. Including a package for the current version in the 'unstable' branch is OK - but please make sure it is clearly marked as an alpha version - and, if you do this, we would hope any package gets updated to the new version as soon as that is available.
I will add to package's documentation a clear mention of it being an alpha version. In addition the font is installed from the package with its original file name which explicitly indicates it being an alpha version too. I'll make sure that this alpha file gets erased from user's filesystem upon upgrade to the next version of the package containing the font's beta version with a supposedly different file name.
Great - no one has had any real problems with the alpha version
other than some ligature combinations not being supported in that version
and rather jagged rendering on screen due to an error in the fonts gasp table settings. These things will be fixed in the next version.
People installing this font will probably need to install a keyboard to input Tibetan script. The dz or bo keyboard in XFree 86 should work.
Only the latest version of Pango (1.8.0) has support for Tibetan script so anyone wishing to use this font in applications which rely on Pango or GTK+ will need to update Pango as well.
Under Linux Tibetan script rendering is not yet supported in Mozilla, OpenOffice or ICU. There is limited support for Tibetan in in KDE/Qt.
I will add this information to the package documentation as a hint to the user.
best regards
- Chris Fynn
Thanks, ...
regards
- Chris
P.S. I'm also converting another Tibetan font to OpenType and at the same time adding many more glyphs. I will also try to create proper bold and italic versions of that font at the same time. This font should be available from:
<https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/free-tibetan/> in two or three months.
I'm encoding this font to work with both Unicode and the new Tibetan extensions to the Chinese GB18030 character encoding standard.
-- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
