[Scribus] The Indian state of Kerala (and Scribus?) (Duleep Samuel) Scribus Digest, Vol 45, Issue 18

[Gora Mohanty]

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 11:36 +0530, Duleep Samuel wrote:
[...]
> I dont accept the statement, even cab drivers in Bangalore will answer
> me repectfully only when I talk in English (or they will say EEN
> Sarere nimake English Nodillayava (Dont you Know english)

Please remember that this is anecdotal evidence based on *your*
experience. The hard facts are that less than some 6-8% of the
population of India speaks English. By contrast, about 60%
understand some form of Hindi.

> My question is "Who should develop such fonts" only Scribus unpaid
> volunteers, not IISC /IITs / IIMs / CDAC / IDLC or INFOSYS / WIPRO /
> TCS why only Scribus and that too free, why cant such great
> corporations tie up with OSFand sponsor some good work, why does CDAC
> refuse to release its ISFOC fonts produced using OSF tools and by
> Taxpayers money (as I know till recently),

That is an issue that you should take up with CDAC, maybe? Incidentally,
Unicode is the way of the future, and probably OpenType too, at least
as far as Indian language fonts are concerned.

>                                             I say because of of the
> availability quality but free materials we all feel that every wish of
> us should be met by others, someone somewhere, freely.
[...]

Have you looked beyond CDAC and ILDC? There is a small, but vibrant FOSS
community in India and other countries working on such issues. I believe
that I even posted this link to the Scribus mailing list earlier, but
here goes again. http://indlinux.org/wiki/index.php/IndicFontsList has a
list of non-commercial Unicode, and usually OpenType, fonts for many
Indian languages, several of which are GPL licensed. Rather than start
yet another font project, please pick up and improve one of these.

Regards,
Gora