Title: Proofing and debuging fonts with Hibizcus tools
Abstract: Hibizcus is a suite of free and open source font proofing and debugging tools for South Asian and South East Asian languages. Most of the languages in these regions are written in a script that belongs to the Brahmic family, in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. This is different from a complete alphabetic script like Latin, where the vowels and consonants are treated equally. In Brahmic scripts, when consonants and vowels combine to form a unit, the consonants may change shape or have other marks attached to them to indicate a combination. These marks can appear before, after, above or below the consonants. This combining behaviour can generate hundreds or even thousands of possible, unique, and beautiful, letter forms in a script. The workshop will demonstrate how to check if all the required units for a script are in the font, all the required combining marks are in their correct positions and if all the parts are laid out correctly by the shaping engines. Hibizcus is at https://hibizcus.com
About Instructor:
Muthu Nedumaran
Typographer, Founder of Murasu System Sdn Bhd, Malaysia
Muthu Nedumaran has over 3 decades of experience in typography. He started out by drawing large banners and posters with Tamil and Latin inscriptions while he was at school in the 70s. His initial works in the digital space were bit mapped fonts for the computer screen and dot matrix printers. Fast foreword a few decades, Muthu’s type design for all of the Indic and Indo-Chinese scripts are now bundled into operating systems like Mac OS X, Windows, iOS and Android. The popular Tamil type called 'Inaimathi' continues to render Tamil text beautifully on iPhones, iPads, HTC Android devices and even the Apple Watches. The same typeface is used as the standard type for Tamil text by the Ministries of Education in Singapore and Malaysia. Besides Typography Muthu has also innovated and built fast and efficient input methods for all the languages he works on in various platforms.
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