If you haven't seen yet, check it out:
For non-Persian-speakers: FarsiTel, a spinoff of Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc., has
unveiled a fully localized Persian Android system. Iranian calendar,
typeahead dictionary, local maps, lovely font, you name it.
I like the website in particular. Very clean, beautiful web-font.
Congrats, everyone who worked on this. Makes me very proud to see where
FarsiWeb is heading.
Cheers,
behdad
Nice work! I just don't know whether this could be an application that we'd install on the upstream Android or a whole separate distro.
>> For non-Persian-speakers: FarsiTel, a spinoff of Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc., has
>> unveiled a fully localized Persian Android system. Iranian calendar,
>> typeahead dictionary, local maps, lovely font, you name it.
>>
>> I like the website in particular. Very clean, beautiful web-font.
>>
>> Congrats, everyone who worked on this. Makes me very proud to see where
>> FarsiWeb is heading.
"Behdad Esfahbod" <beh...@behdad.org> said:
> And a video:
>
> http://vimeo.com/13480387
A video in Persian would be better I guess. After all, the entire audience of the product, hence the video speak Persian.
SinDoc
Nice. Is it released anywhere? What's the license? Can the glyphs be
contributed to DejaVu Sans please?
behdad
Mostafa
First, let me thank you for being nice to the font. Let me give you
some additional information about Iranian Sans font:
The license for the font is very similar to Bitstream Vera. It is a
free license and entitles you to use and modify it as long as you
don't release a modified variant with the same base name. The purpose
of this restriction is to protect end-users from the problems that
arise from having multiple similarly named fonts with incompatible
metrics or design.
The difference of the license with Bitstream Vera is an additional
restriction for distributors of the font that expressly prohibits
charging for distribution of verbatim copies of the font.
The copy of the license that I have mentions "Iranian National
Initiative for Free and Open Source Software" (www.foss.ir) which is
now dead or dormant and as far as I know, Persian
language/writing/font related projects of that initiative is now
considered part of SCICT.
It is also worth announcing that:
I am in the process of resuming the support and maintenance of the
font package and will host an improved official version if I can
obtain the permission from SCICT and Neviseh Pardaz. As I mentioned,
releasing a modified version of the font with the same name is not
covered with its release license and requires special permission from
the copyright holder, which I am not yet sure who the holder is.
Also let me note that Neviseh Pardaz (www.nevisa.com) was the main
contractor of the font. Hadi Navid (www.cameraglimpse.com) and I were
the consultants/subcontractors (I was the primary developer, so any
blames for lack of quality goes to yours truly).
By the way: the current license permits copying of the font glyphs
into DejaVu font if you wish. It is actually very easy to do so, since
the vertical metrics (especially descender) of the font is very
compact and compatible with Latin fonts.
- Hooman Mehr
P.S.: I attach a copy of the font license text that I have. It might
not be the final version of the license.
behdad
Hi everybody,
Hi Hooman, seems like your message was rejected by the group because it
contained a zip file. Can you please resend with plain text attachment?
Thanks,
behdad
On 07/20/10 20:00, Hooman Mehr wrote:
Please do send the latest versions over when you get the time.
On 07/21/10 12:51, Hooman-Mehr wrote:
> P.S.: I ask google group admin to split "Iranian Sans" font discussion
> topic from the original FarsiTel topic to make it easier to find it in
> the future.
Anyone know how to do that? Can't find such an option.
Cheers,
behdad
I understand where you're coming from. Desktop Publishing, and normal desktop
/ web use are two completely different usecases, and require different fonts.
That's why I think having a separate package is useful, but having the glyphs
replace DejaVu's is also useful.
> There is another possible issue:
>
> Different cultures that use Arabic script (Iranian Persian, Afghani Dari, Arabic in various Arab countries, etc) have different tastes. They also may prefer different ligatures or glyph shapes. The existing "Iranian" font may not appeal to other (none-Iranian) cultures. One possible solution would be using OpenType's language discrimination features to design per-language variants while keeping its current look for "default language". For example, the existing "Iranian" font uses language variants feature to show Arabic comma shaped decimal separator instead of the Persian slash shaped separator if the language is set to Arabic. It defaults to Persian shape when language is not specified. This has limited use, though. You can not radically change the design and look of a font based on the language let alone if the languages share the same base script. It will be very confusing for the end-users and impede correct identification of the font.
OpenType can handle the minor differences. Other than that, matter of fact is
that the DejaVu Arabic glyphs are so ugly anything replacing them would be an
improvement and hugely appreciated. It bothers me that we don't have a nice
decent Persian font in Fedora, because there is no nice released Persian font
family with clear legal status and license :(.
behdad
> - Hooman