Re: [Samskrita] Unicode Fonts (open type or WOFF) which can displaylegacy fonts .pfb (walkman chanakya etc)

[Anunad Singh]

Kiran Gupta ji,

You forgot to attach the list of fonts, but I think it is not required. I have been associated with development of font converters and can say that 100% accuare font converter can be designed if required. Some errors are visible after conversion to Unicode and they are mostly related to 'wrong typing'. By this I mean legacy fonts give some amount of liberty in typing. Even these typing errors can also be corrected along with font conversion.

I do not see any other option for your problem. A font converter can be desinged in a day or two which can convert thousands of files in batch mode without any manual intervention.

May be a free font converter is already vailable for you. It may need a bit of fine-tuning if you are very particular about accuracy. Also, the unicode file so obtained may be passed through a good spell checker and thus the text made more accurate than the original.

-- Anunad Singh

2013/12/5 karan gupta <karang...@gmail.com>

This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (karang...@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Hi,

I am a publisher, and i am facing some difficulties related to legacy fonts in hindi.

All new EPUBs (Standard format for EBOOKS) require the fonts to be either of open type or WOFF which is not the case for most Indian legacy fonts (list attached below).   

Since all backlisted content with Indian publishers is in these non-unicode format, it cannot be converted to the digital files. Generally font conversion can be done, but it leaves errors which are very difficult to identify.

I would like to ask for help in development/link of unicode fonts which can be used to read the legacy fonts by just replacing the font file in html documents (In my opinion if the font definition is identical then the errors would not come in). 

Please let me know if anyone can offer some advice in this regard.

Thanks,

Karan

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "samskrita" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to samskrita+...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to sams...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/samskrita.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--

जब भी देश पर विपत्ति, जुल्म, गुलामी की मुसीबत आई है।
अपनी यह हिंदी ही काम आई है।
रामानंद और रामानुजाचार्य से लेकर
अन्ना तक सबने हिंदी ही अपनाई है।

[karan gupta]

Anunad Ji,

I am aware of this process as such. But it becomes a cost prohibitive exercise when i am asked to get my entire book list re-validated by a proof reader/editor after the batch conversion. You can imagine the cost of having a good quality editor going through say even a 100 books of 100 pages each.

This is why i am looking for an otf font which can be used in EPUB3 embedding, which can read exactly like my non-unicode font. I will attach the list for your use, and you can perhaps suggest something more? ( I might have been wrong to say legacy, these are type 1 fonts)

FONTS	FONT TYPE
KrutiDev	ttf
Walkman Chanakya	pfb
Chanakya	pfb
Shiva	pfb
Shiva medium	pfb
Akbar	pfb
Amatya	pfb
Madhvi	pfb
Pervina	pfb
Subak	ttf
Abhushan	pfb
Priya	pfb
SG	pfb
Kundli	ttf
AAAman	pfb

[Anunad Singh]

Karan ji,

I think that a font converter can be designed which can give you almost 100% correct results and then you do not need proof reading. The correctness need not be seen word by word, or page by page but it will be evident by randomly seeing even 10 pages.

But here are some problems with solution:

(1) I was thinking of converting text files. So formatting etc has to be redone.

(2) If the text contains English mixed with Hindi, all English words will be converted to some rubbish-looking words in Devanagari.

(3) You have listed so many fonts. If your files have mixed fonts (a single file has Krutidev, Chanakya and some other fonts in it) it will add to difficulty.

It is possible to keep formatting undisturbed while changing the font, for which a font converter macro for MS Word or Pagemaker (I do not know whether it allows to use macros) has to be designed. But this process (font conversion using macro in MS word) is slow. Also it may not allow batch conversion.

-- अनुनाद

[karan gupta]

Anunad Ji,

Your 3rd point hits quite close to the mark. It is a standard practice with all writers that we use different fonts within our text to show headings, footnotes, references etc. The same is true for almost all books. They all contain a mixture of these fonts in some capacity or the other.

Which is why i am trying to just change the font itself. I will not even touch the text file, but just change the pointer/link for the fonts. The html doc (inside the EPUB) will automatically refer to the relevant otf font.

This is why i'm looking for someone who can help me design otf fonts which have the same character sets as the post script fonts.

Regards,

[eddie...@gmail.com]

Karan,

   Google for 

           "shiva.ttf font"

           "shiva medium.ttf font"

              . . .

Download

then Input them to

     http://www.freefontconverter.com/    -  select "otf"  for the output format

    you get "shiva.otf"

            . . .

I've tried it with "Chanakya.ttf".

Windows 8.1 fonts library accepts "Chanakya,otf" and installs it . . .

   Taff Rivers

Voila!

[karan gupta]

Taff,

Thanks so much for this. I never thought to google for the font with the extensions. 

Regards,

Karan

[Shailee Mittal]

Hi Taff,

Thank you so much for this help :)