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The New Wave of Indian Type

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Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#31

Post by henrikeh »

This made me think of Metafont[1] which D. Knuth developed in conjunction with TeX. The idea was to do font-design by drawing with a virtual brush -- but with perfectly smooth curves and a build-in constraint solver. The end result is that the entire Computer Modern family is parameterized (and generated on-demand) as TeX is using it. As an example, the serif, sans-serif and typewriter fonts are the same Metafont program, but just with different parameters.

Looking at the repo for these Indian fonts you can see that they use FontLab Studio[2] for the work. Browsing the homepage reveals how complicated and involved font crafting is -- let alone the design!

[1] Metafont: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont

[2] FontLab Studio: https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio/

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#32

Post by mavelikara »

nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

This usually comes up in the skilled immigration backlog discussion when someone chimes in "But we want the skilled immigrants to be diverse. That's why we have a per-country cap!"

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#33

Post by bfred_it »

Tomte wrote: post #24
Something1234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't font files be compressed, as that would just be using a dictionary which I believe that GZip already does.

They are compressed. Do you perchance mean "dynamically loaded, on demand"? Because there's no standard for it. Because – as usual – "good enough for Western audiences".

That sounds like an attack on westerners. Obviously westerners develop ideas for westerners first; That’s what they understand and that’s what they need. The lack of solutions for the billions of users of a writing system should not be the fault of the people who don’t use it. Sure they can do better, but they don’t deserve that tone.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#34

Post by Tomte »

avarun wrote: post #30
Tomte wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are compressed. Do you perchance mean "dynamically loaded, on demand"? Because there's no standard for it. Because – as usual – "good enough for Western audiences".

Seems like there would be demand for a font format that allows character modifiers to dynamically be applied to characters. This would allow the language to be represented digitally similarly to how it's taught in the real world, rather than as thousands of unique Unicode characters.

That is at least conceptually part of Unicode. You can encode „ü“ both as the character (one code point) and as „u“ followed by „modifier Umlaut“ (two code points).

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#35

Post by Tomte »

bfred_it wrote: post #33
Tomte wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are compressed. Do you perchance mean "dynamically loaded, on demand"? Because there's no standard for it. Because – as usual – "good enough for Western audiences".

That sounds like an attack on westerners. Obviously westerners develop ideas for westerners first ; That’s what they understand and that’s what they need. The lack of solutions for the billions of users of a writing system should not be the fault of the people who don’t use it. Sure they can do better, but they don’t deserve that tone.

I cannot argue with „first“, but considering that this „first“ has been, what?, five decades ago, thinking that a „second“ should have emerged by now may not be totally unreasonable.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#36

Post by jonathanyc »

bfred_it wrote: post #33
Tomte wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are compressed. Do you perchance mean "dynamically loaded, on demand"? Because there's no standard for it. Because – as usual – "good enough for Western audiences".

That sounds like an attack on westerners. Obviously westerners develop ideas for westerners first ; That’s what they understand and that’s what they need. The lack of solutions for the billions of users of a writing system should not be the fault of the people who don’t use it. Sure they can do better, but they don’t deserve that tone.

I fail to see how the tone in your comment is at all appropriate for the comment you are responding to. You seem overly sensitive on this issue.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#37

Post by moultano »

parthdesai wrote: post #27
nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

In India, language and food, both change every 200km. When you tell this to people who haven't been to India, they usually think you are exaggerating but it's surreal how diverse India actually is.

The best analogy for westerners IMHO is to compare India to the EU with a stronger central government.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#38

Post by elcapitan »

Tomte wrote: post #34
avarun wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like there would be demand for a font format that allows character modifiers to dynamically be applied to characters. This would allow the language to be represented digitally similarly to how it's taught in the real world, rather than as thousands of unique Unicode characters.

That is at least conceptually part of Unicode. You can encode „ü“ both as the character (one code point) and as „u“ followed by „modifier Umlaut“ (two code points).

Glyphs in fonts already make use of composite features (ü can be u + ¨, just the coordinates of the references). But readability of type can be complex, so I don't know if that's a viable solution to compose large-nonwestern fonts in a way that is natural to read. There may be very subtle differences that force the designer to decompose the parts and make modifications.

Re: The New Wave of Indian Type

#39

Post by allpratik »

nkoren wrote: post #18

> The language and script change every five hundred miles Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is much more diverse than that. In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous…

Seriously, I am trying my luck in NLP with some Indian languages like Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati and Tamil. The sheer number of dialects is driving me nuts.

Even dialects have very different sounding words or pronunciations which increases the complexity exponentially. But I am trying it only with an eye on its potential. NLP will simply act as the catalyst for technology adoption in the rural and semi-rural area.

I'm thinking to study China's approach here since I heard even Chinese is incredibly diverse.

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