Font Debate
The following contributions have been made to this debate. If you would like to comment, suggest mappings etc, please send an e-mail to fontdebate
Rupinder Singh Mann 12th February 2003
Dr Kulbir Singh Thindh 11 May 2000
Hardip Singh Pannu 20 May 2000
Major Singh Thind 4 June 2000
Parmeshwar Singh Bains 10 May 2000
Mr. Thind has devolped
very nice fonts. But the problem is that
they use ANSI encoding. That means they display english characters
as Punjabi.
Moreover they can be used in a word processor or webpage only.
Only the person who has the same font can view the document
correctly. Otherwiswe it comes off as garbage because computer
treats it as English because encoding in ANSI.
We have to think of future and of devolping applicatins and
Operating Systems in punjabi. This is only possible if there is a
standard encoding. Now fortunately Unicode is there. WE must take
full advantage of it. With Unicode different persons can develop
different font and people can view the document even if they have
a different font.
Unicode also means that we can name files and folders in punjabi.
In fact i have doing this on my WindowsXP system.
We can even devolp application with menus and dialog boxs in
punjabi.
I request Mr. Thind to take advantage of his experience and devolp
Unicode fonts. They will serve us un a long way.
Also keep in mind that unicode is here to stay. If we do not take
advantage of it we will miss the bus.
The use of Gurmukhi on
the web is at a very early stage of development, yet
this medium can have a powerful impact on the continuity and development of
our language.
At the moment we are hindered in its use by two factors:
1) Many/most Panjabi internet users do not have the necessary fonts
installed on their home machine nor on any networks at work or
school/college.
2)Those of our brothers and sisters who do have a Gurmukhi font find that
when they try to read something written by someone else - it often comes out
as nonsense because the writer has used a different font to the one they
have.
This is seriously limiting the use of Gurmukhi for reading and writing.
English does not suffer from these drawbacks - there is an agreed
international mapping of keys - so that if a reader does not have the font
used by the writer, a substitute font can be used without altering the
spelling of the words. Can you imagine the web without this level of
agreement!
It would not be appropriate for me to suggest to yourself what the best
mapping for a Gurmukhi onto an English keyboard should be.
I call upon you to communicate with other Gurmukhi font-writers to agree a
common mapping.
I am sending this message to all the people for whom I have e-mail
addresses. Please pass on the message to any other font-writers you know
of. We should be able to sort this issue out via e-mail fairly
rapidly.
Together we can advance the development and progress of our mother-tongue,
to develop our common culture and strengthen and preserve our unique and
proud identity.
Once we have an agreed
common standard it can be presented to the
Microsoft/Unicode authority for adoption as the official code for Gurmukhi.
See www.microsoft.com/typography/OTSPEC/indicot/default.html
and
www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html
for further details. We could then
ask for a Gurmukhi font to be shipped with all the various OSs.
(10 May 2000)
The issue of standards
regarding Gurmukhi fonts is a complicated one.
Discussion of issues in reasonable detail would be difficult in the email.
I will discuss few basics here.
The international standards that have been developed in the USA for all the
international fonts, including Gurmukhi. According to that standard, the
location of characters for Gurmukhi is such that no one can type any
character with the standard key board (not even with the Alt key) without
installing expensive & cumbersome font managers developed for the purpose.
Presently, such a font manager is available for use with Macintosh
computer. I don't know when it will become available for MS Windows. Many
difficulties remain even with the use of font with appropriate managers.
Developed international Gurmukhi fonts have only one set of characters and
it does not include many characters that are unique to write Gurbani.
For many reasons, most users of Gurmukhi/ Hindi fonts, both inside and
outside India do not use fonts developed on the International standard.
However, their use has increased somewhat lately (mostly regarding Hindi).
Use of such fonts limits the user to use only one font for a
script/language and makes doing searches of text difficult. With these
fonts many of the neat functions of word processors such as "Insert
Symbol"
become impossible. However, such fonts do provide advantages as well, such
as elimination of font conflicts and spell-checking capabilities without
conflicts.
Other than the International standard there are many fonts available inside
and outside India. However, in India the most popular fonts use a key map
lay out that started with the Ramington Gurmukhi typewriter. The reason for
this is simple. Before the computer era, most professional typists were
used to that layout and so the transition did not require any effort.
However, from functional point of view the key mapping based on the
Ramington typewriter is quite dysfunctional (although a lot can be said
about this issue, I prefer not to describe this issue any further).
'Asees' fonts created by me are based on this key map and are targeted for
use by professional typists in India. Like my other fonts, those are also
free and have become quite popular.
The fonts that I & many others have developed use standard locations that
are used for English. Thus, except for the shapes, the characters behave as
if these are English characters. My fonts are interchangeable between
Windows and Macintosh environments. In my opinion my GurbaniLipi fonts and
many other fonts that use the same key map are easy to type by those who
use English keyboards.
Just a few character locations in the GurbaniLipi family of fonts are at
such locations that each character on such a location behaves as a complete
word by itself (^, &, |, \). However, these characters are very rarely used
in modern Gurmukhi. Thus it is very possible to develop spell check
dictionary for use with these fonts that will be 99% accurate in picking
misspelled words.
I also made Samtol family fonts upon request from S. Kirpal Singh Pannu &
associates . Now there is talk about changing the mapping of Samtol to make
a new family of Chatrik fonts . The fact is that no matter how one does
there is compromise to be made. In my personal opinion there are many
negatives in changing key maps again and again. This simply creates more
confusion. Once one is used to a key map it is hard to change to another one.
I am not sure that there is an authority that can force any user to adopt a
particular standard (even if one is declared by any organization to be a
standard). Ultimately, only the international standard that is already
developed will probably survive or what ever becomes popular will probably
prevail. I do not make money in promoting any standard... and so it does
not matter much to me. However, I will be happy if I can be useful to
Punjabi writing/reading community and I will keep making attempts in that
direction.
My fonts are embeddable in the documents. However, to make use of this
feature the user has to know how to embed the font in the document; but it
is a simple process of putting a check mark in the options dialogue. Once a
document with embedded fonts is opened by the target user, he/she will have
no difficulty in viewing or editing the document.
(11 May 2000)
We need to attack this
issue on two ends. One would be to create a standard
keyboard mapping for all Punjabi Characters and have room for future growth.
I have seen Hindi and Unicode Punjabi characters where multiple characters
are represented by a single keystroke. It may be desirable to (future
character combination) have similar features in Punjabi fonts also.
Second would be to have some input towards UNICODE standard so that UNICODE
mapping is what we would like it to be.
So how do we do it?
I suggest we setup an internet site where we invite input from users about
the mapping etc. Then we all agree to pick the standard most users want adopt
it in our fonts and forward that standard for inclusion into UNICODE.
Volunteers please come forward!!!
(20 May 2000)
Major Singh Thind Thind writes
It is not a nice thing
to see more than a
dozen different type punjabi fonts, I think there should be a
set standard of Punjabi Fonts. I am using quite a few of these
and the best of all are Anmol/Gurbani Lipi fonts created by
Kulbir Singh Thind. These are much simpler to use and everyone
should be encouraged to use these.
(4 June 2000)
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