1.08. Be encouraged to volunteer professional skills to good causes and contribute to public education concerning the discipline.

Though this project has client we involve in this as a complete voluntarily. Our work will be a complete uplift for the font designers to overcome the technical barrier and contributing in the development of Sinhala Unicode fonts. Font creation technologies are tightly couple with Python language. But working knowledge of Python language is not in average designer's tool set.

We will not get paid or we are not targeting for a revenue from this work. This is only an effort to contribute our knowledge in the process of increasing the reachability for Sinhala content through search engines. This work will be in an open Git Hub repository which any one can access freely.

1.01. Accept full responsibility for their own work.

This project is completely open source and client is Mooniak. Mooniak is currently in the process of creating number of Sinhala Unicode web fonts to add to Google fonts. Though the client is Mooniak we are responsible of each and every releases we do in the software although we cannot take the responsibilities of the usage of the software since it is free.

 We will take the responsibility of any copy right issues regarding the libraries and frameworks used to create this tool. We will thoroughly confirm that this will follow each and every license and agreements of the libraries or software used to create this tool. For example we use Robofap python library for interpolation and we depend on service level of Robofap legal according to their license.

What is Sinhala Font Tool?

In order to publishers to involve in using Sinhala Unicode fonts for their works won’t happen unless there is number of Sinhala Unicode fonts with different styles. Designing a Unicode font requires some technical knowledge beyond the knowledge of a normal font designer.

•  The designer first draws the maximum weight glyph set and minimum weight glyph set.
• Then by interpolation geneerate number of glyph sets with intermediate weights.
•  Combines the open type features with glyphs and output the font bineries as .otf or ttf.

 There are python scripts and libraries such as Robofab are available to do this interpolation and compilation. But it's over the technical knowledge of average designer. So idea of base sinhala project is to create a single command line tool to do the interpolation font compilation. As the first iteration of project we have created a script which automatically creates intermediate glyph sets in UFO standard font repository. The next step of the project would be creating g-sub and g-pos tables for sinhala characters and finishing the compilation tool. That part of the project will take lot of time, research and expert advices as we have to write spacing tables for all the characters.

Why we need Sinhala Unicode

Before 1998 Sinhala fonts were designed based on ASCII which was very different from current Unicode standards. Designing a Sinhala font was not very easy task because of the larger number of different characters the languages possessed (around 1200 different characters) and most of the time they differs largely from each other. With the initiative of the people like Mr. Pushpananda Ekanayake who was a Sinhala font designer, lot of ASCII Sinhala fonts were designed by overcoming those issues during 90’s.

Unicode was introduced to the world in 1989 in order to have a consistent encoding mechanism among every language in the world and during 90’s Unicode evolved rapidly in the world and ASCII fonts was deprecated. But in Sri Lanka Unicode was approved in 1998 and the transaction from Sinhala ASCII font to Sinhala Unicode font did not happen as expected. Most probably it's due to the fact that creating a Unicode font needs more technical knowledge than ASCII font. Therefore “Iscola Potha” is the only Sinhala Unicode font available vastly online and offline publishers. All the major Sinhala publishers still uses ASCII Sinhala fonts due this. Using ASCII fonts is a problem when it comes to indexing used by search engines. Therefore Sinhala content on web will be not cached by web browsers enforcing a massive limitation of knowledge based on Sinhala articles. And also ASCII text cannot be translated to another language using automatic translators. Therefore we need to push towards Sinhala Unicode font designing.