Tamil Fonts
TTF (True type font) fonts are widely
in use with systems having Windows 95/ Windows 98/ Windows
NT platform. For systems with Windows 2000/XP/2003 and
Linux platforms OTF (Open type font) are being released.
This effort is first of its kind and most of the word
processors (existing and new) will be able to make use
of these fonts. This in turn will make more fonts available
for users with Tamil Net/Tamil 99 and Typewriter keyboards
for data entry.
An OpenType Font is a digital font adhering to the OpenType
specification. OpenType fonts provide the advanced typography
features required for complex writing systems – such
as Brahmi and Semitic language scripts. The OpenType
specification enables support for ligatures, positional
forms, alternates, and other substitutions. OpenType
fonts also may include information that supports two-dimensional
glyph positioning and glyph attachment.
OpenType fonts are used in conjunction
with a script processing library and the OpenType Library
Services (OTLS). The OTLS is a set of text-processing
helper functions. In the Windows Operating System, the
Uniscribe and OLTS are part of the operating system
libraries.
GIST-DVOT/GIST-TMOT range of OT font
is for Devanagari/Tamil script, developed by GIST Group
of C-DAC. The languages written using the Devanagari
script - Hindi, Marathi, etc are supported by this font.
The special features of the Devanagari script, namely
the ‘reph’, ‘rakar’, ‘akhands’ (conjuncts), ‘nukta’,
reordering and repositioning of characters, below-base
forms, half forms are implemented in this font. The
glyph set of this font have been optimized to get the
best performance.
The fonts are aesthetically developed
specially for the purpose of content creation and
display. The readability of the font is greatly enhanced
due to the uniformity of the shapes of the glyphs of
the font. The font is embeddable which means that static
web content can be developed using this font and displayed
in a browser without any download.
Target application areas:
- Developing Indian language web content
- Developing desktop applications to support Indian
Languages
- Developing Unicode based Indian language search
engines
- Developing Indian language corpus for various language
tools
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