No support for Tibetan Uchen Font

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The page introducing the Noto fonts says that Tibetan is not yet supported. It 
has a page in the Unicode basic plane, so this absence is surprising.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by bernie.s...@gmail.com on 4 Aug 2014 at 12:54

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks a lot for your interest. Noto Tibetan is still under development.

Original comment by roozbeh@google.com on 4 Aug 2014 at 3:41

• Changed state: Accepted
• Added labels: Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Type-Defect

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Despite the fact that Tibetan has less than 255 characters in Unicode it 
requires from a couple of thousand to many thousands of glyphs to properly 
represent and experts are not that readily available. So, actually not that 
surprising.

We intend to support all of the scripts in Unicode and all the languages that 
use those scripts.

Original comment by stua...@google.com on 12 Aug 2014 at 1:06

[GoogleCodeExporter]

With Tibetan it might be best to take a step-by-step approach...

Modern everyday Tibetan and Dzongkha can be supported with a fairly small 
subset of glyphs. The set of most frequently occurring extra combinations used 
in transcribing Sanskrit ans other languages (combinations found in religious 
tests in e.g. mantras) is about 3 or 4 times that size.

Then there are thousands of combinations which are very infrequent.

If a font supports the first group of glyphs it is perfectly useful for day to 
day communication, newspaper articles, office work etc.

Adding support for the second group of glyphs will enable rendering the vast 
majority of everything else written in Tibetan

The third group of glyph combinations is found in rare, specialized and obscure 
Tibetan texts. Most readers and users of Tibetan will never, or only extremely 
rarely, encounter these. 

Maybe design the font to support basic Tibetan at first - in a way that support 
for additional combinations can be added later.

If you need help with Tibetan - get in touch.

- Chris Fynn

Original comment by Chris.F...@gmail.com on 20 Mar 2015 at 4:07

[GoogleCodeExporter]

See also the approach taken by MS Himalaya, it can typeset virtually any stack, 
even very convoluted mantras (at the cost of quite generic design).

I'm not as expert as Chris is, but if there is something I can do, please tell 
me, I've worked on some Tibetan fonts.

Original comment by roux.e...@gmail.com on 31 May 2015 at 11:39

[brawer]

Regarding the three groups of glyph combinations mentioned by Chris Fynn, is there a list somewhere? It might be interesting to check coverage of NotoSansTibetan. http://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-tibt https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-fonts/blob/master/unhinted/NotoSansTibetan-Regular.ttf?raw=true

[jungshik]

Our approach to Noto TIbetan is very similar to What Christ Fynn wrote. Roughly, our font should support the first two groups ('roughly' because presumably, the boundaries between three groups are not cut and dried; the first group (everyday modern use) should be fully covered, though).

[brawer]

See also https://github.com/googlei18n/nototools/issues/38. It points to a page by Chris Fynn, where the Tibetan glyphs are split into usage groups.

[jungshik]

What's this bug about? Shouldn't we close this bug now that we do have Tibetan fonts?