Inconsistent kerning of U+0979 DEVANAGARI LETTER ZHA

[dscorbett]

Font

NotoSansDevanagari-Regular.ttf

Where the font came from, and when

Site: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/blob/46eb8fa0c46d16a87eee3e763baa3efb7423a8b4/phaseIII_only/unhinted/ttf/NotoSansDevanagari/NotoSansDevanagari-Regular.ttf Date: 2019-10-20

Font version

Version 2.000

Issue

Forms of ža aren’t kerned the same as the analogous forms of ja.

Character data

ज्कक्ज U+091C DEVANAGARI LETTER JA U+094D DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA U+0915 DEVANAGARI LETTER KA U+0915 DEVANAGARI LETTER KA U+094D DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA U+091C DEVANAGARI LETTER JA ॹ्कक्ॹ U+0979 DEVANAGARI LETTER ZHA U+094D DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA U+0915 DEVANAGARI LETTER KA U+0915 DEVANAGARI LETTER KA U+094D DEVANAGARI SIGN VIRAMA U+0979 DEVANAGARI LETTER ZHA

Screenshot

[JelleBosmaMT]

The half-ja and full-ja glyphs are kerned in order to render conjuncts. For the zha I know that it is used to transliterate Avestani. But normally Gujarati is used for transliteration. Even for Gujarati I don't know if the zha is used in conjuncts at all, let alone what conjuncts that might be. But if I kern it with Ja in Gujarati there might be a chance it is used. For Devanagari the odds that the character is used at all in anything but a Unicode chart seems small. The odds are that if it has conjuncts at all, it is unlikely to be the same as for Ja. So it seems to me that adding kern pairs makes the font larger for all users, while not providing any functionality.

[simoncozens]

Just testing this with Noto Serif Devanagari, and found an additional bug where it isn't forming the half form:

[simoncozens]

I've fixed this for the Sans. There's no zha half form in Serif and given the comments above about Avestani maybe that's OK.