New TeX fonts for Indian languages

[ucgadkw at ucl.ac.uk]

I was checking out the CTAN archive on Friday, and noticed two new Indian fonts
for TeX: 

*  Bengali by Muhammad Masroor Ali (masroor at human.ai.kyushu-u.ac.jp),
and 
*  Gurumukhi by Amarjit Singh (asingh at evolving.com).

The Bengali is an adaptation of an earlier 300dpi bitmap font, so is best when
used with 300dpi laser printers.  It also needs ITRANS to be installed.  

The Gurumukhi, however, is a proper METAFONT vector font, and is thus suitable
for all levels of printing, from dot-matrix right up to phototypesetting.  It
looks very nice indeed.

Finally, news is just breaking of a new Devanagari Sanskrit font by Charles
Wikner (wikner at nacdh4.nac.ac.za).  This started off as an adaptation of the fine
Velthuis font which is in wide use by TeX users.  But Wikner has ended up with a
substantially different font, which I find very attractive.  It has a less
formal look than the Velthuis, with a nod in the direction of high-quality
calligraphy.  He has written a completely new pre-processor too.  The biggest
step forward is that Wikner's system permits the use of Vedic accentuation,
which opens up a whole new range of uses.  The pre-processor also allows the
same transliterated input (which is essentially the same as Velthuis input) to
appear either as Devanagari or as romanized transliteration with a simple change
of macro.  The i-hooks that connect to consonants are all different widths, in
order correctly to join the consonant upright.  There are other nice features
too.

Wikner's Devanagari will also appear on CTAN in a day or two.

The CTAN -- Comprehensive TeX Archive Network -- is a group of ftp/www sites
which provide huge archives of TeX software, and which mirror each other.  The
British site is ftp.tex.ac.uk; the US one (not always up to date) is
ftp.shsu.edu.  For the above materials, look in /pub/tex-archive/languages.  For
a general www overview of CTAN, see http://jasper.ora.com/ctan.html.

Dominik



--
Dominik Wujastyk