Half forms are not to be used in Bengali

[sridatta1]

Title

Half forms are not to be used in Bengali

Font

Noto Sans Bengali & Noto Serif Bengali

Where the font came from, and when

Tested on https://fonts.google.com/noto/fonts site: June 26, 2022

Issue

Half forms are not the feature of Bengali script, they are not found traditonally. For supporting arbitrary conjunct sequences, some of font makers have tried inventing Devanagari-like half forms for Bengali. The conjuncts with smaller half forms look very incorrect. So for the other conjuncts where there are not ligatures in the font, either the ligatures can be added wherever it's necessary or just the virama should be used for the fallback. e.g. Text: স্স গ্ঘ ক্শ প্ফ ক্খ ম্হ

2. Observed results

Tiro Bangla font

Also the following comment on Bengali half-forms can be looked into https://github.com/notofonts/bengali/issues/1#issuecomment-1160653599 https://github.com/notofonts/bengali/issues/1#issuecomment-1160653600

[simoncozens]

For supporting arbitrary conjunct sequences, some of font makers have tried inventing Devanagari-like half forms for Bengali. The conjuncts with smaller half forms look very incorrect.

This may be, I'm afraid, one of those things which starts out "wrong" but becomes right because everyone is doing it and people get used to seeing it. Checking the fonts on Google Fonts, ITF and Tiro use viramas but everyone else uses half forms. (Important context here: I really respect ITF and Tiro, and I think they are very likely to be correct. I'm not talking about correctness, just that they are outliers.)

I suspect if we remove the half forms, we will start getting issues asking where they're gone.

Maybe we can move them to some discretionary feature; perhaps a stylistic set. But I think I need more advice before making such a visible change.

[joanaranito]

I'm afraid, one of those things which starts out "wrong" but becomes right because everyone is doing it and people get used to seeing it.

ITF and Tiro use viramas but everyone else uses half forms. (Important context here: I really respect ITF and Tiro, and I think they are very likely to be correct. I'm not talking about correctness, just that they are outliers.

At Universal Thirst we also don't include Bangla half-forms. Linear half-forms (like in Devanagari) don't exist in Bangla, but are becoming popular because they come in the predefined Bangla set in Glyphs; and because the pre-defined Bangla engineering in Glyphs requires them. But that doesn't make them right or a feature of the Bangla script.

Regarding the concern about removing the half-forms, I'd argue that everyone can read and recognise a full form + virama, whereas incorrectly implemented half-forms not only look wrong, they can even can cause confusion in reading. Some of the half-forms are just shrunken versions of the full form (like ka, for example - see image below). But because the following character in the unsupported conjunct doesn't stack below the ka half-form, the ka half-form can easily be mistaken by a full-form ka.

"Everyone is doing it" doesn't seem like a good enough reason to change how a script works in type vs how it works in writing :)

[simoncozens]

Fair enough, I agree with your arguments for removing them. I will work on that. But this:

"Everyone is doing it" doesn't seem like a good enough reason to change how a script works in type vs how it works in writing :)

I'm not sure about in general. Typographic practices can become mainstream, and from there become expected, and from there inadvertently cause the evolution of writing systems. (For example, how many Tamil typefaces adopted the Latin stroke contrast from the Western mission presses.) This is one of the reasons why Noto is so important to me; if we get stuff wrong, particularly with minority scripts which don't have too many other fonts available for them, we could end up setting a new, corrupt norm...