FIRST NATIONAL INDIC FONT WORKSHOP

["Irfan Khan" <khania2@super.net.pk>]

[from Sarai Newsletter, MAY 2003]


FIRST NATIONAL INDIC FONT WORKSHOP
March 28-30, 2003, Bangalore 


Ravikant and T. Meyarivan from Sarai participated in the First 
National Indic-Font workshop, organized by Indic-Computing 
Consortium, held on March 28-30, 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. (http://indic-computing.sourceforge.net)  

The workshop, second in the series, was attended by 36 participants 
from various languages & technology groups across India, Nepal & 
Bangladesh. This workshop was an outcome of discussions 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 points and agenda for the 
group was to Hold OTF training workshops for developing major Indic 
language OTF fonts.  

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  

At the end of the workshop it was proposed to take up the issues that 
have emerged at  depth through regional consultations on each 
language to allow focused attention and for local & regional groups 
to participate and discuss everyday 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 will be coordinated by regional language 
groups and include training programs, technology demonstration 
sessions and get the language community together.  

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