[Project-ideas] GSoC idea for improving the aesthetic quality of Indian Scripts

[Mayank Jha]

Initial draft:

*Project: * To make a testing application for assessing the quality of Open
Type fonts for Indic scripts.


 *Motivation: *

I am personally interested in doing this project because, I have been using
applications like MS Word, Photoshop, GIMP etc, throughout and require
varied fonts with nice looks and appearance.

However unfortunately whenever it came to Hindi my choices got narrowed to
3 or 4 fonts only as compared to at least 40-50 choices for the Roman
script. Thus, making this tool would allow font developers to contribute
more good quality Open Type fonts for Indic script.


 *Implementation Details:*


 I will be implementing this application for the Devanagri script. To
implement the testing application what I propose to do is, first of all set
standards or rule-sets ie what to search for in any Devanagri script. There
exists a current application called fontQA but that runs only inside
FontLabs, which is not freely available, therefore it is very difficult to
try, modify and test it.

Therefore I plan to make a separate application.


 Illustrating what I would like to look for in the Devanagri script, ie the
standards followed by uniscribe used by microsoft . Is listed below:

   1.

   Positioning of dots, dot is present at the bottom of the consonant.
   2.

   How joining of conjoined consonants is done like the letter ksha.
   3.

   Positioning of reph over the base line when the letter ra is conjoined
   with any consonant.
   4.

   Below base conjoining of ra with a consonant, like dra.
   5.

   Half form of consonants, wherein only half form of a consonant is used,
   like the ka in the word waqt.
   6.

   Conjunction of ta with ra .
   7.

   Conjunction of da as in the word vidya.
   8.

   The matra of e used in consonants.
   9.

   Formation of reph.
   10.

   Use of anuswar and chandra bindu with other vowel matras.
   11.

   Use of halant.


 The above points can be extended further, to improve quality assessment.


 These characteristic features would be identified in some standard font,
like MANGAL or which is the best available standard. Two fonts will be
compared based on how close/similar they are to these standards, and the
developer would be shown the shortcomings in each of the form so that they
will have point wise difference between the fonts, which otherwise needs
qualitative judgement.


 To really compare two fonts we would be needing to compare their GSUB and
GPOS methods used when formation of the text is done. So I would be using
the FreeType library to analyse the fonts.
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