> The language and script change every five hundred miles<p>Huh, somebody is making a vast over-simplification, presumably in a well-intentioned attempt to package this in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile. India is <i>much</i> more diverse than that.<p>In my youth I spent some time bumming around Saurashtra, a region in Gujarat state that's about 150 miles square. Nearly 50 languages are indigenous to that one region alone. Not dialects. Languages. It's wonderful, but nuts.<p>That was almost 20 years ago; no doubt it's more homogenous now, which is sad to think about. A century ago nearly 80 languages were spoken there, so linguistic diversity has been declining fast. Any effort to preserve it deserves applause.
This made me think of Metafont[1] which D. Knuth developed in conjunction with TeX. The idea was to do font-design by drawing with a virtual brush -- but with perfectly smooth curves and a build-in constraint solver. The end result is that the entire Computer Modern family is parameterized (and generated on-demand) as TeX is using it. As an example, the serif, sans-serif and typewriter fonts are the same Metafont program, but just with different parameters.<p>Looking at the repo for these Indian fonts you can see that they use FontLab Studio[2] for the work. Browsing the homepage reveals how complicated and involved font crafting is -- let alone the design!<p>[1] Metafont: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont</a><p>[2] FontLab Studio: <a href="https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio/</a>
I always wondered why many non-Latin (mostly cursive) scripts have little variation across different typefaces. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough? Well, the article mentions a similar observation by a Sri Lankan typographer, so I guess I am not alone. Can someone maybe point me to other non-Latin typefaces that have "their own typographic style"? I found the Baloo samples (last one in the article) refreshing. The style of the Tamil and Devanagari samples is very close to the Latin sample. For the Mina samples (first figure in the article), I can see that they try to capture the character of the Exo Latin typeface, with certain strokes getting narrower towards the end and its superelliptic curves (are there typographic terms for these?). I am not used to reading Bengali, but the style of the sample looks like it is in a font that has a different weight.
I admit that despite of the ubiquity of Indian fonts these days, I still use English to write messages conveying Bengali/Hindi words, because I'm more comfortable that way. I don't remember the last time I wrote a letter in Bengali/Bangla or Hindi, and when it comes to electronic communication, it has always been English for me. So it feels strange for me to start writing in Bengali using my keypad all of a sudden.
This is the first time I've ever seen this construction (using "that's" instead of "whose" as a relative possessive pronoun): "...the ongoing use of English, a language that's reach and influence has grown considerably..."
Based on what friends from South India tell me, it looks like South India in particular is embracing English. Even poor people are sending their children to schools where they can learn English. Most of the people I know, when they text on a phone use the Latin alphabet. India has fully embraced the global system which is based on English. I would guess that within 20 years, more people will speak English on a regular basis than Hindi.
Language is the life of art & literature, much of the Indian subcontinent's culture has huge emphasis on that. So, this actually is a huge deal in preserving it for posterity.
Speaking of Asian fonts, does anyone know of CJK character sets that can be loaded via CDN à la Google Fonts -- for example, Google's Noto CJK Simplified Chinese fonts?
People very strongly underestimate the impact on the net once many people who were hitherto disconnected, finally come online.<p>Provided they realize there is a greater web beyond facebook and the various trap gardens.