Digital Font Design : The invaluable link in the chain

Font design in Indian scripts has suffered from the lack of a unified, cohesive effort. In the absence of workable, practical standards too much time and energy is unprofitably spent without achieving the desired result. The ISFOC (Indian Standard Font Code) standards create a platform for responsible font design thereby facilitating the growth of beautiful Indian scripts. S K Mohanty dwells on the finer aspects of Font Design.

The first rule of typography is very simple- if the text does not look good it prevents the reader from reading. Typography in complex Indian scripts has suffered considerably due to the lack of proper standardization. Good typography implies well structured letter forms in a particular font, pleasant inter-letter spacing, ideal word spacing and healthy interline spacing .The distinct characteristics of the font used in the text should do justice to the subtle nuances of mood in the text. Emphasis must also be given to the design of full stop, commas, nuktas, matras, bottom consonant combinations, mathematical signs and symbols which are often neglected. Apart from this, the composition of text in terms of its point size, layout in terms of its alignment, margins, spaces between columns and the overall grayness of the page also count. Most important is the final reproduction, where distortions to the typographic images take place during reproduction through various output devices.

There is no doubt that today typefaces in Indian scripts are creating more interest than ever before. The users of typefaces have become more educated because of the widespread use of computers. Different types of users have realized that expressive typefaces with no confusion in shape recognition and aesthetic quality make a document more presentable, and effective. Presently only a handful of people are involved in type design activities in Indian scripts. Most of them hardly follow any particular standard, thus producing poor quality fonts. However there are very few who are working towards the user’s long term needs.

Font developers spend more time in trying to trace the outline of an image than in giving thought to the structural complexities of the letter forms of Indian scripts. Often it is seen that complex shapes are formed out of combination of simple shapes, however it is not practical the other way.

Appropriate standardization of the character set in a particular script not only makes fonts compatible to various popular software packages, but also helps type designers to concentrate more on the aesthetic of font design rather than getting bogged down in designing superfluous conjuncts and various unwanted shapes which are really not in use today. Most of our Indian scripts have conjuncts with complex shapes, which were evolved for various archaic writing tools. These conjuncts were often written in an inconsistent way, giving various shapes to the same character, depending upon the scribe.

The goal of ISFOC (Intelligence based Script Font Code) standards is to compose a block of text in a more disciplined manner. The aim is that a single word should have one particular visual image at any time. This enhances the readability and clarity of the text. A common standard character set has been defined for each Indian script with which a minimum number of characters can represent all valid character combinations within the same basic set, thus removing the confusion in multi-tier compositions. This has been achieved without compromising the traditional aspect of the concerned script. The ISFOC standard allows the designer to create in a wide range of type styles.

With the evolution of digital typeface design, scaling fonts from a single master often creates problems (particularly in Indian scripts), when implemented for smaller point sizes. Hence the type designers can concentrate more on the structural issues, and other design techniques supported by rasterizing technology, ensuring high quality of displayed and printed letter forms. However, even the most sophisticated computer tools now available for making digital typefaces do not ensure type quality. Only with proper standardization and a detailed study on complex shapes, can designers create elegant, meaningful, practical and usable typefaces.

The GIST Group of C-DAC has evolved the ISFOC standard that allow various top and bottom matras, consonants and conjuncts, for most accurate positional alignment in a multi-tier structural composition particularly in Indian scripts. A common standard character set has been defined for each Indian script with which a minimum number of characters can represent all valid character combinations within the same basic set. Care has been taken to retain the popular conjuncts inspite of the availability of simpler alternatives, as people are used to them. Where ever, alternative styles of writing a word exist, the simpler and clearer form have been chosen. Efforts have been made to rationalize the character shapes to remove any ambiguity.

These standards have helped a great extent to make complex scripts compatible with various software and output devices which are normally designed for simple scripts like English. Several innovative digital fonts have been designed at C-DAC for computer and other media which constitute a rich repertoire of aesthetic and high quality fonts in the following scripts:

Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, Sinhalese, Bhutanese and Arabic with Urdu in the pipeline.

The spectacular output produced using ISFOC fonts makes the text look harmonious and dramatically contributes legibility and readability to the text in low as well as high resolution digital output devices. These includes image setters, laser printers, dotmatrix printers, multilingual pagers, conventional as well as web publishing. The fonts developed at C-DAC, GIST has been acknowledged by many professionals all around the globe as the best quality fonts in Indian scripts available in the market today.

S.K. Mohanty is Group Co-or-dinator, GIST and oversees the activities of the Font Team as part of the overall GIST activities.
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