Tamil Fonts for GNU/Linux - yimg.com

Tamil Fonts for GNU/Linux Project Members: Mamcy Samy ([email protected]) Nithya Nagaraj ([email protected]) o Aim This project aims at creating new unicode Tamil fonts and fixing bugs in already existing Tamil fonts for GNU/Linux. The total number of Tamil fonts properly free software licensed and made available at GNU/Linux distributions are very little. Not all fonts that we use today for Tamil are perfect Unicode fonts. That made us to start to this project and contribute to tamil computing.

o Modules Involved 1. Font Designing (artistic work) • Vector drawing (or) • Hand drawing 2. Unicode Mapping (mapping designed character to unicode number/string) 3. Combination Rules (For derived letters and words)

o Tools involved 1. Inkscape An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

2. FontForge An outline font editor that lets you create your own postscript, truetype, opentype, cid-keyed, multi-master, cff, svg and bitmap (bdf, FON, NFNT) fonts, or edit existing ones. Also lets you convert one format to another. FontForge has support for many macintosh font formats.

3. GIMP GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free software raster graphics editor. Primarily, GIMP [5] is used as a tool for photo manipulations, such as resizing, editing, and cropping photos, combining multiple images, and converting between different image formats. GIMP can also be used to create basic animated images in the GIF format. This project will be executed under the guidance of ubuntu-tam loco team and NRCFOSS. Project development status and files will be available at https://launchpad.net/freetamilfonts

o Reference 1. http://www.gnu.org/ 2. http://unicode.org/ 3. http://www.inkscape.org/ 4. http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/ 5. http://www.gimp.org/