New font available with Computer Sanskrit encoding

[d.wujastyk at ucl.ac.uk]

I have spent some hours recently making up a CS (Computer Sanskrit) version of
Adobe's font "Utopia".  It is quite a nice font, perhaps a little more of a
"book-face" than the Bitstream Charter that has been available for some time in
CS encoding.  

The Utopia font is a professionally designed typeface which has been officially
released by Adobe Inc. for free distribution.

I have made the following files available:

adobe-utopia-font-CS-encoding-PS-10.zip	
adobe-utopia-font-CS-encoding-PS-10.readme
	and 
adobe-utopia-font-CS-encoding-TTF-10.zip
adobe-utopia-font-CS-encoding-TTF-10.readme
	
by anonymous ftp from
	ftp.bcc.ac.uk in /pub/users/ucgadkw/indology/software

or via your web browser at URL
	http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgadkw/indology.html
(follow the links to INDOLOGY supplementary gopher -- software)

The filenames are long, in order to be explanatory.  I hope this doesn't cause
any problem downloading the files.  It shouldn't, with modern software.  The
"10" at the end of the names is a version number: I expect to make minor changes
from time to time to upgrade these fonts, especially in the area of font
encoding vector.  The "PS" fonts are PostScript (for any system that supports
Adobe Type Manager, including Windows, OS/2, Mac etc.); the "TTF" fonts are
TrueType, for use with raw Windows 3.1 and up, and the Mac.

I am sorry to say that I do not have the time to help anyone with acquiring,
unzipping, or installing these fonts.  The procedures are not difficult, and are
well documented in your system manuals.

The *.readme files give brief documentation about the fonts, and explain the
files to be found in the zip archives.

The CS encoding is documented in other files at the same place as above.  It
provides a font with the ready-made characters required for working in romanized
Sanskrit, e.g., a+macron, t-underdot, and so forth.  These extra, accented
characters are in standard positions, defined by the CS "standard" agreed at the
Vienna World Sanskrit conference some years ago.

The Sanskrit characters in the CS forumulation ride "piggy back" on the IBM
code-page 437 extension to the ASCII character set.  I.e., where there is no
Sanskrit character, expect to find the appropriate cp437 character.

This arrangement is looking increasingly dated.  Especially with these Utopia
and Bitstream fonts, in PostScript and Truetype format, which are clearly aimed
at Windows and OS/2 users, etc.  The base character set for Windows is not
cp437, so characters from a cp437 coded font are sometimes not where Windows
expects to find them, and Windows programs vary in the elegance (!) with which
they solve this problem.

I think a discussion, probably at the WSC in Bangalore next year, must be held
to rethink the encoding issues, and to take account of people's experience using
these fonts over the last few years.

I would like to hear how people get on with these fonts, and especially whether
they work okay on a Mac.  I don't have access to a Mac for testing.

Enjoy!

Dominik Wujastyk





--
Dominik Wujastyk