Romanized Indic (transliteration) meta-font

[Thomas B. Ridgeway]

Status: RO

For the limited benefit of that part of the Indology world which
is able to make up fonts with metafont, you are invited to look
at a metafont based on the CS/CSX Classical Sanskrit/Classical
Sanskrit Extended text encoding scheme.  The code for same is
available in blackbox.hacc.washington.edu [128.95.200.1] in
directory pub/indic
 
Please do not forward this notice to other lists or news groups.
 
Below my signature is a copy of the readme in the ftp directory.
 
cheers,
Tom
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Thomas Ridgeway, Director,
Humanities and Arts Computing Center/NorthWest Computing Support Center
35 Thomson Hall, University of Washington, DR-10
Seattle, WA 98195   phone: (206)-543-4218            *  Ask me about  *
Internet: ridgeway at blackbox.hacc.washington.edu      *    Unix TeX    *
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This is a pre-release version of the Washington Romanized Indic
family of fonts, based on the proposed CS/CSX encoding of
transliterated Sanskrit (and other Indic languages).  The fonts
contain a copy of the standard CMR fonts in positions 0 to 127
and the CS/CSX characters in their locations in `upper ASCII'
according to the proposed standard.  The fonts also contain
other characters which are not recognized in the CS/CSX standard;
some of these are drawn from the IBM-PC character set, and some
are from other transliteration systems which may be convenient for
people dealing with India.
 
This software is being released during the testing phase on a
``need-to-know'' basis; please do not re-post this message in
the view of the general public as that would likely tend
to provoke a lot of mail, which would at this point only detract
from my ability to properly finish things up.  You are welcome to
privately circulate the fonts/news of the fonts to individuals
you think might benefit from or be able to contribute to the enterprise
with their suggestions.
 
Be advised that the font families are still under development and
changes, including changes in the arrangement of the HACC extension
characters may be made.  The CS/CSX characters do not at this
point have kerning values applied to them.  You won't be able to
do much with any of these unless you know how to run Metafont.
Don't ask me; look it up.  The CS/CSX characters, --by default--,
do not place the correct information in the tfm file about their
actual heights and depths; this is arguably the `correct' behavior
for characters which are `accented' (it is also arguably incorrect).
It will, however, prevent you from being able to apply TeX's own
accent operations to the characters in the CS/CSX set since TeX won't
know how tall they really are.  (The rationale for the untruth BTW is
to prevent awkward glops of whitespace intruding between lines when
an *occasional* very tall accented character shows up.)
 
Suggestions for additions and changes will be considered with
the same level of charm and graciousness with which they are offered.