Noto Serif Bengali critique

[jacobathomas]

I'm here at the TDi at Reading University with Marek, and he asked me to critique the Noto Serif Bengali. For a little background, I grew up in Bangladesh where I have worked for the last decade as a graphic designer with Latin and Bengali designs. My feedback on the Noto Serif Bengali font:

• The ও strikes the eye as feeling too large
• The থ head (curl/ball) feels too small and cramped
• The স্থ (sth) feels very stunted and short
• The এ feels like it extends too high
• The bottom tail of the হ/ই feels too short and cramped into the upper body
• The perfectly vertical initial stem of the দ seems too geometric
• The chandrabindu is over the consonant instead of the vowel, which is wrong
• The 'গ' is too cramped together, it feels like it should extend further down
• The 'গ্র' (ga with raphala) compresses this even more, and the contrast between the compressed and non-compressed looks even more awkward
• The 'ষ্ট' feels like it's falling forward
• The rikaar is too compressed into the 'ত' ('তৃ')
• The flourish in the 'i-kaar' seems pulled high
• The ফ্র feels too condensed vertically
• The reph feels too small and weak
• The top left elbow of the জ feels weak and indecisive

Honestly, I wouldn't use it the way it stands. I do use the Noto Sans Bengali now and then, but I really don't like their weak "ণ" in the sans.

Hope that helps!

[marekjez86]

Thank you very much for a thorough feedback. Could you elaborate on 'weak "ণ" in the sans'? Is it too small, poorly drawn or structured? Is there an image of text from a newspaper, a website, a magazine, a sign, etc... with what you'd consider 'strong "ণ"' ?

[jacobathomas]

The letter doesn't extend far down enough; the curve ends too early. This may have been an attempt to match the curvature of the other similar strokes in the ন and ম, but it needs to be different here. I hope the image makes it clear.

[JelleBosmaMT]

Seems a fair comment about the Sans ণ. Unification of features and simplification of shapes is what a Sans makes a Sans for scripts that do not have serifs to begin with. I may have been too consistent here. I haven't looked at the design in several years, but will be having a fresh look when starting with additional weights.

Of course this Github item being mostly about the Serif, maybe the bowl of ণ should have a separate issue number. Now I am assigned to an issue that I am not expected to do something about.

[marekjez86]

The new version of Bengali was reviewed by Fiona hence I hope the critique here was addressed. See https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/tree/master/phaseIII_only/unhinted/ttf/NotoSerifBengali

[Dhiman4us]

1. The first missing feature of NotoSansBengali is the missing of bunch of i-kars of different lengths. Just like Devanagari, In Bengali the length of ikar depends on very much of the wideness of a character. Though NotoSansHindi/Devanagari has it.

2. Some glyphs of Samsung default/stock SEC-Bengali font are wrong! Some years ago it was smooth without any glitch. I think the old one was Google NotoSansBengali without any modifications. But later SAMSUNG have modified the fonts i.e. Google NotoSansBengali to SEC-Bengali in such a way that become disaster for the whole Bengali community. It changes the shape of some BASIC IMPORTANT glyphs like "ম"(Bengali-Ma, U+09AE) thats very different from the original one and looks so close with other glyph "য"(Bengali-Ya, U+09AF). I am attaching screenshots comparing both previous and new wrong glyphs. We, the whole Bengali community who are using samsung devices are suffering from this issue from past 2/3 years. Please ordered Samsung to fix it.

[JelleBosmaMT]

The maintenance update of Noto Sans Bengali has i-vowel signs with variable length. It also has a Ma with what I think are improved proportions (new version to the right). I am not sure if I would have recognised the Ma of SEC-Bengali as being a Ma. Noto Sans Bengali was criticised by some for using a style without knots. Maybe the SEC version was an attempt to make it into the knot style, but then without a knot.