[scribus] OT: Font Designer

[Asif Lodhi]

Hi Greg and a.l.e.,

On 12/12/08, a.l.e <ale.comp_06 at xox.ch> wrote:
> hi
>> I think the bottom line is that you have exhausted our knowledge of
>> all this.
>> We have had some contact from people in the past suggesting that there
>> are efforts to create some open fonts in various Indic languages. It
>> may be worth trying to see if you can find these people for their
>> contacts and information, how they managed to get started.
>> Perhaps fontforge has some users who are working on related fonts. Do
>> they have any forums?
> iirc at the last LGM in wroclaw there were people who are developping
> free fonts for asiatic languages. iirc correctly they were sleeping in
> the same dorm as i was :-)
>
>
> looking at the LGM program should tell who they are (iirc at least one
> of them had a speach which i missed)

I have not yet found anyone who is developing a FREE, but high
quality, Urdu Nastaleeq font. The only quality font that I have found
so far is "Traditional Arabic" (or, perhaps, "Simplified Arabic" or
something like that) from Microsoft but since Arabic does not have
some very common Urdu Alphabets - so, Arabic fonts cannot be used for
Urdu publications. The basic Naskh fonts are easy to design using font
designing software but I really wonder how the complex script
"Nastaleeq" fonts would be designed as Urdu alphabets change shapes
when joined and sometimes they get below the baseline, sometimes _on_
the baseline and sometimes above the baseline. The same alphabet is
written differently based on context. I think that the font itself
should have some kind of a programming support - the font should know
as to *how* it has to render the next character in the document and
that whether it's going below the baseline, above the baseline or on
the baseline.

Any more helpful comments?

-Asif