Re: UDP, Lentsa, Monlam fonts (was: Re: Fancy Pecha Borders)

[Christopher Fynn]

Hi

bjlhundrup wrote:

> As I'm sure you know a Lantsa is really really needed. I use Jomo and
> Lamas seem to like its look but I can not wait for your up-date. I'm
> testing this Umay for Gerry and I got to say its quite good. have you
> seen it. I have been only playing with it for a day but love it
> already. The Monlam Font (yig-chung/s) are pretty but I think they are
> hell to use and have yet to be able to use fully 100%. Have you tried?
> Do you still plan on adding to the UDP program. Is there any way for
> you to offer this to the PP project so that all those fonts and key-
> boards could be used?  and those Monlam Bod-yig is there any way to
> add them to the UDP?  Just asking.


UDP:
The UDP program is made by Leigh Brassington  - it has nothing to do with me.
If you want any features added to that program contact Leigh directly.


Lentsa font:
The Lentsa font I'm making is likely to take a long time - maybe years- to finish (unless  someone
sponsors me to  complete it) - I've already spent over eight months _full time_ work on it and it is
only half done. Now I only get a chance to work on that font when I can find some spare time - and it is
only one of several ongoing font projects I'm working on.


Monlam fonts:

Although the Monlam fonts claim to be "Unicode" they are in fact not properly encode for
Unicode. He has mapped Tibetan glyphs to Unicode code points for Thai, Khmer

I'm also sorry to inform you that Ven. Lobsang Monlam's fonts were not actually designed
by him .  If you investigate you will find that Monlams fonts are all Tibetan fonts originally
made  by commercial font companies in China. Originally these fonts had a Chinese
encoding  designed to work with proprietory Tibetan typesetting / DTP software made
in China. Lobsan Monlam has simply re-encoded the fonts and changed the fontname
and copyright fields. In a few cases he has "created" bold or outline versions by running
the automatic bold and outline features in FontLab - but since he has made no attempt
to clean up the resulting outlines the technical quality of those fonts is pretty poor.


"Monlam Ouchan Uni" is a  a straight copy of the 2003 beta version of Microsoft's
Himalaya font ( then called "Ximalaya") - all Monlam has done is change the name of the
font and put his own name and put his own name in the copyright field.
(Incidentally this is the only one of Monlam's fonts which is proper Unicode.)
That font was originally made by the Founder company in Beijing - and the glyph
outlines were originally in a font called  TibetBT though considerable cleaning
up of the outlines has been done and many other major changes made in the version
released by Microsoft.


see the attachments to
<http://list.mail.virginia.edu/pipermail/tibetscript/2007-September/000390.html>
for an illustration.

You can find TibetBT at:
<http://www.tibet.cn/tibetzt-en/zyfy/images/Tibetbt.TTF>


The glyphs in  "ML Ouchan4" "ML Chougma chong" and "ML yigchong", "ML Pytsig"
and other fonts are all directly copied from other commercial Tibetan fonts made in China.
The outlines the glyphs in these fonts are technically very well done and there is no
way one individual could have made even one of these fonts in a few months - let alone 
all the fonts he claims to have made. (While doing  his Geshe studies at Sera) -  it was the
sheer quantity of the  fonts Monlam claims to have  made which made me investigate this
in the first place as I know very well how muchh work this entails.

The automatically created bold and outline versions of some fonts wich Monlam has made
have very poor glyph outlines (typical of autmatic interpolation) compared with the other
fonts.


- Chris