[smc-discuss] Best practice for supporting alternative rendering of glyphs: ന്റ & റ്റ

[Baiju M]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 5:54 PM, Santhosh Thottingal
<santhosh.thottingal at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, March 18, 2014, Baiju M <baiju.m.mail at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> What is the best practice for supporting alternative rendering of
>> glyphs. I need alternative rendering for ന്റ & റ്റ: ന്‍റ & ററ.
>
>
> I would not attempt this, at least for these letters. It creates ambiguity
> in reading.
> ആന്‍റി, ഹെന്‍റി  have different ന്റ, similarly a test case we have in our
> font repo - ലാറററൈററ് has many possibilities of reading.

I agree.  My use case is for re-printing old books printed in this format.

Here is two examples from a book published in 1834:

ന്റ usage:

http://ml.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%BE%E0%B5%BE:Benjamin_Bailey_New_Testament_Malayalim_language_Second_edition_1834.pdf/11&action=edit&redlink=1

റ്റ usage:

http://ml.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=%E0%B4%A4%E0%B4%BE%E0%B5%BE:Benjamin_Bailey_New_Testament_Malayalim_language_Second_edition_1834.pdf/14&action=edit&redlink=1


>> Santhosh mentioned about orthography selection in the application
>> layer in another thread. In order to support that, what is the change
>> required in the font ?
>
>
> It is not easy to support both in the same font

So, this will require to fork Rachana and create another font.
Is there any way to maintains glyphs as patches in FontForge ?
May be write some Python scripts to replace glyphs ?

Regards,
Baiju M