Friday 2 May 2008

പ്രവീണ്‍ സത്പുതെയ്ക്കും രാഹുല്‍ ബലേറോയ്ക്കും അയച്ച മറുപടി

മലയാളം യൂണിക്കോഡ് ഫോണ്ടുകളായ മീരയും ലോഹിതും തമ്മില്‍ പ്രവീണ്‍ സത്പുതെ ഒരു താരതമ്യം നടത്തുകയുണ്ടായി. എന്നാല്‍ പ്രസ്തുത ബ്ളോഗിലേക്കുള്ള കമന്റുകള്‍ അദ്ദേഹം മോഡറേറ്റ് ചെയ്യാന്‍ തീരുമാനിച്ചു. അതുകൊണ്ട് , അതിനുള്ള മറുപടി ഇവിടെ പോസ്റ്റു ചെയ്യുന്നു. ഇത് മെയ് 1 ന് ഇവിടെ പോസ്റ്റു ചെയ്തതാണ്.

രാഹുല്‍ ഇതൊന്നും കണ്ടില്ലേ ?
242016
441654
അതോ ഇതൊന്നും "ബഗ്ഗ്" എന്ന വിശേഷണത്തില്‍ ഉള്‍പ്പെടില്ലേ ? മലയാളം റെന്‍ഡറിങ്ങില്‍ നിലവിലുള്ള 2 പ്രധാന പ്രശ്നങ്ങളാണ് ഈ 2 ബഗ്ഗിലും വിവരിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളത്. ലോഹിതിന്റെ പ്രശ്നങ്ങളും ഇതില്‍ ഉള്‍പ്പെട്ടിട്ടുണ്ട്. മലയാളത്തില്‍ ഒരു ചൊല്ലുണ്ട്: "ഉറങ്ങുന്നവരെ ഉണര്‍ത്താന്‍ എളുപ്പമാണ്. എന്നാല്‍ ഉറക്കം നടിക്കുന്നവരെ ഒരിക്കലും ഉണര്‍ത്താന്‍ പറ്റില്ല". അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ റിപ്പോര്‍ട്ട് ചെയ്തുതിന്റെ ഒന്നാം വാര്‍ഷികം ആഘോഷിക്കാന്‍ പോകുന്ന ഈ ബഗ്ഗുകള്‍ക്ക് ഒരു പരിഹാരം ഉണ്ടായിട്ടുകൂടി അതു നടപ്പിലാക്കാത്തത് എന്തു കൊണ്ടാണ് ?

5 കോടി ജനങ്ങള്‍ സംസാരിക്കുന്ന ഭാഷയുടെ ലിപി എങ്ങനെ വേണമെന്ന് തീരുമാനിക്കുന്നത് ഒരിക്കലും മലയാളം ഉപയോഗിച്ചിട്ടില്ലാത്തവര്‍. കഷ്ടം !!!

It's ridiculous that people who don't know or use Malayalam are commenting about Malayalam font and rendering issues. So I purposefully posted this in Malayalam.

8 comments:

sankarshan said...

I appreciate the fact that you have posted in your local language. However, it would be really helpful if you could provide (at least) a summary of the issue in English. It helps a lot of readers who may not be directly involved with your language, but understand the need to communicate issues with more clarity.

libregeek said...

The translation of the above post:

Rahul, haven't you seen these bugs:
242016
441654
Or these bug reports doesn't qualify as "bugs" ? The Malayalam rendering errors are reported in the above bugs which also includes the issues related with lohit-malayalam fonts. I understand that you are also in the Cc list of the above bugs. These were in the bugzilla for almost a year and still not resolved, even though the solutions are already posted there.

It's a pity that people who never used Malayalam are evaluating the Malayalam fonts and taking decisions on rendering.

Pravin Satpute said...

Thanks for pointing my blog as a for your comment

i think it is right place to write things i have given to Malayalam community.

i am in language computing from 2005, when we developed samyak-fonts series fonts which includes samyak-Malayalam fonts. there are lots of user using these fonts developed by non Malayalam peoples

i have solved lots of Malayalam script bug you can see here
http://sarovar.org/projects/samyak/

presently i am one if the maintainer of samyak-Malayalam fonts upstream

also i have included this samyak-fonts in fedora 9

also smc-fonts i packaged for f9 you can see my new blog on that effort i have took for Malayalam
http://pravin-s.blogspot.com/2008/05/including-smc-fonts-packagemalayalam.html

after working more than three year in language computing i have worked on all almost 22 official indic language, even though i dont understand language but i understand script. I hope you know that Malayalam is bramhi family script and it's syllable formation is same as Devanagari and i know Devanagari script.

I am one of the presenter in the National workshop on Calligraphy and Typography.
http://pravin-s.blogspot.com/2007/07/blog-post.html

I have worked on worlds most complex script nastaliq arabic. and you can see i am one of the developer of nabeel nastaliq(i done this work in CDAC)

I hope you have see Malayalam Language CD distribute by DIT. The work on that happened in CDAC and i have actively solved lots of problems that.

It is very bad too see your comment that non-Malayalam cant comment on Malayalam script.

if you go very details in blog i have written about pravin-s.blogspot.com/2008/04/difference-between-Malayalam-fonts.html

you will find these are very generic comment and anyone non-Malayalam can understand that.

If you think you know better than what i have written please point out difference what i missed that the way we can improve lots of things and help Malayalam community.

i am marathi person but working for all indic langauge and i will keep on working on this.

Unknown said...

Manilal, of the bugs, #242016 is not a bug by any standard of bug reporting if you know, it is more like a history and future of issues with malayalam script rendering, with no reference to whether its a pango, qt, font or what version of what product problem. It is only the courtesy of fedora developers that the bug is still alive as a valid bug.
About #441654, if you remember, it was not the only bug that was present for malayalam. The first patch that got submitted on the bug was only two months back. And since then we all have been trying to get it solved. If you follow the comments on the bug, I had given all the support needed to get the suresh's patch committed. Now if we are not able to find a proper solution that will confirm to the standards of an upstream project, we need to work on that real issue, and not the who-should-who-should-not kind of non-technical things.

libregeek said...

I am not an expert in fonts or the complex rendering rules in pango. But I believe that I know my mother tongue and using it in my computer for along time.

AFAIK, a normal computer user shall expect his/her language to be correctly shown in the applications rather than beauty of the fonts. I have commented Pravin's posting, just because he didn't mentioned about the disadvantage of using lohit-fonts. (In ubuntu, if I use smc-fonts there are no issues except issue #441654, but lohit is still broken)

I was never aware that #242016 didn't meet the standards of a bug. However as a user, I'm least concerned about the standards in bug reporting. I believe that it's the responsibility of the developers to elucidate the cause of the problem. I'm also a software developer and I don't expect users of my software shall point out that : "hey this error is in the xajax module" or "this error is in the foo.so", instead I have to work with them to find out the real cause.

Khaled Hosny said...

I don't read Malayalam or any other Indic script, but as an Arabic user and some how font developers, I usually find Arabic fonts developed by non native speakers usually ugly, no mutter how much effort they done in it but it looks ugly and I can usually tell that this font is developed by some one who doesn't read Arabic natively (look at Arabic part of Dejavu Sans or Mono, it it the ugliest Arabic font I ever seen, it is in fact an ugly imitation of the ugly Tahoma font). This not to see any thing against those people who are trying to help the others, but not being a native speaker makes you loss many fine details and the common taste of the script or the language (yes even people using the same script but for different languages has different preferences)

sankarshan said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
libregeek said...

@raju
Which GNU/Linux distribution you tried? Fedora 9 and Ubuntu-8.04 comes with bug free fonts(Meera & rachana). However, there are some rendering issues in these distros with regard to Malayalam. The upcoming Fedora 10 have 99.9% bug free rendering and nice fonts. More info : http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/SMC