Nepali Fonts Standard
Nepal Codes for Information Interchange White Paper v2 Font Standardisation Working Committee, 1997 page 17 Table 8 Sets of characters Characters which have half forms JKMN[\^a Characters for extended reach 'ikar' ¿ CEGORSiq¢¬ Characters for extended reach 'iikar' Á <@AV} Data Entry Data entry is normally done from the keyboard and in Nepal this has meant a close copy of the Devanagri Remington Typewriter’s keyboard but in this standard it is possible to offer many different keyboard layouts which the typist will pick from at the time of entering or editing data. The data being stored on the disk will always be the same so it does not matter which keyboard is used to enter or edit the data. When installing the fonts on a computer it will be necessary to also install the KEYMAN program to control the keyboard layouts so installation instructions must be given to explain this. The Keyman program is written by Marc Durdin and distributed by Tavultesoft freely. Windows 3.1 & 95 TTF font creation The above discussions apply quite well to the new standard for TTF fonts except that the options for ‘glyphs’ which are represented by multiple ‘character codes’ is not possible so a more complete list of characters must be assigned directly to codes and all of the work of translating typing sequences must be interpreted by the keyboard program. For this part of the standard refer to the ASCII table 7 which shows the character code assignments and a program is provided called KEYMAN which has to be preprogrammed to correctly choose characters, half characters, and conjuncts according to the standard set out for Unicode fonts. There are some characters missing due to lack of space but be careful not to use the spaces which do not have Nepali characters since many of them are used by programs for their own formatting purposes. There are a number of other things to be noted in this standard and that is the inclusion of double sets of diacritics. This is to allow for proper alignment of diacritics on those consonants which have the vertical stem in the center of characters like / instead of on the right side as with the 8 . Otherwise an alignment problem occurs as seen here. /Ù8Ù/Ú8Ú The first two use the left aligned Ù diacritic while the second two use the center aligned Ù diacritic. In the TTF table 7 above, the first of the pair is for right alignment and the second is for center alignment. So for the Ù the right aligned one is at decimal 232while the right aligned one is at decimal 233. The characters which need the center aligned diacritics are listed in table 8 above. All other characters if they need a diacritic will use the right aligned diacritic. Extra characters in the font that need to be noted are as follows. d69 extra & for use with right aligned 'ekar' Ò d220 lowered Í for tall conjuncts d225 lowered Ò for tall conjuncts d234 extra Ò for alternat Limbu form (ie ÒÛ )
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