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Adinatha Tamil Brahmi font

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 2:17 pm
by jamadagni
Hello.

We (I and two friends) are proud to present probably the first publicly available open-licenced font for Brahmi, Adinatha.

Brahmi is judged to be the progenitor of over 200 daughter and grand-daughter scripts in India and South East Asia. A "dialect" of Brahmi was used to write old Tamil language in the rocks and caves of Southern Tamil Nadu, and is known as Tamil Brahmi. This font caters to this specific form of Brahmi, and was created, among other tools, with the help of High-Logic Font Creator.

We wish to thank the High-Logic people for this excellent product and their help in our procuring a licence for this altruistic cause of preserving the world's epigraphical heritage via such a font (and hopefully many more to come). We also thank the various kind people on this forum with all their help and guidance with our experiments in font creation. I promise many more such queries for you people to answer in the future too! ;-)

Anyhow, we tag this font as "beta" just in case. And in case someone is curious, it is named after Adinatha, the first Tirthankara of Jains, in honour of the Jains having introduced Brahmi to the Tamil region.

Adinatha is released free of charge and under a free licence (the Open Font Licence) so as to encourage its usage among academics and other interested parties, and to thereby encourage more people to be interested in epigraphy and the world's heritage.

Adinatha is based on the existing Brahmi encoding (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U11000.pdf).

Download link to package containing font and manual: http://www.virtualvinodh.com/download/A ... Brahmi.zip

With Regards,

Shriramana Sharma
Vinodh Rajan
Udhaya Shankar

Re: Adinatha Tamil Brahmi font

Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2012 9:25 am
by William
Congratulations on publishing your font and thank you for making it available free of charge.

Readers of my following comments need to know that I only know a little at present about the script, and that amount being known because of reading your post and some of the documentation that you provided.

I opened the font in FontCreator 5.6 and noticed, though I have not done a full detailed inspection, that there seems to be only one printable glyph mapped to plane 0 in the font, namely at U+25CC, for U+25CC DOTTED CIRCLE.

I tried the font in WordPad.

I used Alt 9676 and displayed the dotted circle.

However, using Alt 69669 to try to display the glyph mapped to U+11025 produced a space.

Yet trying letters like e and f produced a black rectangle.

When I first looked at the font in FontCreator 5.6, before I tried using it in WordPad, I thought that I would suggest to you that you consider including letters A through to Z and a through to z in your font. This is because some software packages use glyphs from the font when displaying the name of the font in a font selection menu. So I think it would be a good idea if mapped glyphs for at least the letters in the three words Adinatha Tamil Brahmi are in the font, and if putting some letters of the basic latin alphabet in the font, it seems a good idea to include the whole alphabet in case someone wishes to add a note in English to a document without changing font.

I am wondering if the absence of any printable glyphs from the range U+0021 through to U+007E is why I cannot produce a display using WordPad. I am not sure about that and maybe other people will have other results using WordPad. Maybe the font, due to its OpenType nature, is not really intended for being used in WordPad at all.

As you tag the font as "beta", may I suggest that you have a look at Font Validate... in Font Creator. The automated "Fix detected problems" facility fixed all but one glyph and that one glyph only needed the joining together of two contours that overlapped along a line.

I am wondering about why there are a lot of glyphs with the postscript name .notdef in the font. I am wondering whether that is deliberate as some sort of signalling system for an application package of some sort.

Could you possibly say in which packages you use the font please? I ask because the font is OpenType and also uses mappings beyond plane 0 and I have nothing installed on the computer that I am using that can do both of those.

Anyway, congratulations on publishing the font and I hope that the above comments are useful.

William Overington

18 April 2012

Re: Adinatha Tamil Brahmi font

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 7:12 am
by vanisaac
I'll admit that I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of coverage. I'm seeing nothing mapped for candrabindu or anusvara; no independent or vowel sign L/R/LL/RR; no Kha/Ga/Gha, Cha/Jha, Ttha/Dda/Ddha, Tha/Da, Pha/Ba/Bha, and no numbers. I would have thought that the first functional Brahmi font (to my knowledge) would have been a bit more comprehensive. Sorry.

PS, I have a Brahmi INSCRIPT Windows keyboard layout all made up. If you are interested in having a regular installable keyboard available for download, send me a PM.

Re: Adinatha Tamil Brahmi font

Posted: Thu Apr 19, 2012 7:22 pm
by virtualvinodh
Hi Vanisaac,

The font is specifically for the Tamil variant of Brahmi. Hence lacks conjunct support and other letters which are not present in Tamil-Brahmi. Only the letters present in Tamil-Brahmi have been included.

http://www.virtualvinodh.com/tamil-brahmi-lipi

We are in the process of creating a another font for Asokan Brahmi, which will cover the entire Brahmi Code chart along with full Conjunct support. It may take a few months more.

So do hold on :)

V

Re: Adinatha Tamil Brahmi font

Posted: Sat Apr 28, 2012 6:19 pm
by jamadagni
vanisaac wrote:I'll admit that I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of coverage. I'm seeing nothing mapped for candrabindu or anusvara; no independent or vowel sign L/R/LL/RR; no Kha/Ga/Gha, Cha/Jha, Ttha/Dda/Ddha, Tha/Da, Pha/Ba/Bha, and no numbers. I would have thought that the first functional Brahmi font (to my knowledge) would have been a bit more comprehensive. Sorry.
If you read my original post properly, you will find that I specifically say that this font caters to Tamil Brahmi which does not use the candrabindu etc which are specific to Sanskrit. So I feel your criticism is uncalled for.

Probably the only real thing missing which you correctly point is the numbers which I agree should be added in a proper font. We did call it beta, you know, so people can catch what we really missed out on. Thanks for pointing out that. We will try to include it before removing the beta tag.