[Anubad] [Mozilla India] Ek Mukta: Open Web Font for Devanagari

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

[cc: anubad list at ankur.org.in to get other folks to contribute insights]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 3:36 AM, Soumya Deb <debloper at gmail.com> wrote:
> Girish would be very much interested to discover more use cases of this
> font, including but not limited to Firefox OS (for indic languages using
> Devanagari script - Hindi, Marathi and the likes). Just got to know that
> it's been made available as a package for Fedora now - which is awesome.

Having the font packaged for distributions is important. And
generating enough usage to make the font a default choice is the
obvious next-hard-step. Users need to be made aware of the
availability of the font. Merely having the package in the repository
will not help.

> P.S: I personally requested Girish for a Bengali typeface with similar
> elegance - he inferred Bengali typefaces are more difficult for several
> reasons & require a lot of work. He'd only delve into it, if there's a huge
> request for that. I don't know if we're all happy with the current Bangla
> fonts, or with the advent of Mobile-first content consumption, there's a
> need for improvements?

I am not sure what a "huge request" would be. However, there are a
couple of reasons to consider a Bengali typeface.

[1] The available fonts (and font families) for Bengali are a bit long
in the tooth. While they serve the purpose, the design decisions were
made a long time ago and since then the actual work has been mostly
whittling things.

[2] Print readiness. The current crop of fonts do not appear to be
pleasing when used for printed material. For example, if you'd want to
use Lohit font for footnotes (which are traditionally of a smaller
point size), you will have a reasonably unaesthetic and cluttered
block of text.

[3] Default/Go-To (Web) Font. I think that the experience with ULS (on
Wikipedia) provides a context about not retrofitting existing fonts
into a webfont pattern. Instead creating a default go-to font that can
form the reference baseline for newer font families to be developed.


-- 
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<https://about.me/sankarshan.mukhopadhyay>