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The New Wave of Indian Type
- hmhrex 9y agoSide note: I didn't know Google had their own TLD. Is this new? Seems weird that an organization has that ability to do that.
- dextermb 9y agoAnyone can apply for their own TLD but it's not cheap. £130K+ a year iirc after a long application process
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Anyone can apply for their own TLD but it's not cheap. £130K+ a year iirc after a long application process Anyone could during the one-time “new gTLD” scramble, but applications closed for that years ago; no decision on any subsequent round has yet been made, because the review of that first round has not yet been completed. So, other than establishing a new country and getting a new ccTLD, there's no way to get a new TLD right now.
- DC-3 9y agoICAAN now allows organisations to purchase Branded TLDs. Google, Sky, Barclays among others have done it.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> ICAAN now allows organisations to purchase Branded TLDs No, ICANN years ago allowed that for a limited time, and is currently reviewing the results of that to decide if, when, and how to do so again.
- ehsankia 9y agoThey've added it for over 3 years now, you can read more about it here: https://icannwiki.org/.google https://icannwiki.org/.google blog.google is used pretty often.
- hmhrex 9y agoMaybe I've just never really noticed before. Maybe a case of glancing and just imagining the `.com` after.
- sp332 9y agoIt was pretty gradual. For a while the only public-facing domain was elgoog.google which I think started as an April Fool's joke.
- bennettfeely 9y agoWaiting for google.google to become a thing
- scrollaway 9y agohttps://com.google https://com.google :)
- Kwpolska 9y agohttps://com.google/ https://com.google/ is. It used to be a flipped version of google.com: https://web.archive.org/web/20150401041958/https://com.google/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150401041958/https://com.googl...
- saagarjha 9y agoThere's also https://domains.google https://domains.google.
- sarabande 9y agoYou could do it, it just took $185,000 per application (https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/agb https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/agb) and a super involved process. Edit: s/can/could (thanks to child commenter).
- dragonwriter 9y ago> You can do it, it just takes $185,000 per application [...] and a super involved process. And when you say “super involved”, keep in mind that part of the required process is to travel back in time to before April 2012, because “The application window for the first application round closed in April 2012. Comprehensive reviews of the program are currently underway to assess its performance in meeting intended objectives. These reviews will inform ongoing discussions with the ICANN community to determine when a second round will take place.” [0] [0] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/program https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/about/program
- konschubert 9y agoCern has one too: https://home.cern https://home.cern
- forapurpose 9y agoWhy did CERN spend $185,000 plus labor on a TLD?
- beojan 9y agoCERN is one of the rare cases this makes sense, since it's otherwise an international organisation with a domain under a ccTLD of a specific country (Switzerland).
- planteen 9y agoWhat about cern.int instead of cern.ch?
- forapurpose 9y ago> makes sense It might make sense by the logic of domain names, but it doesn't by the logic of return on the investment of scarce resources. cern.org or cern.ch or cern.anything would meet all functional needs just as well and for much less.
- intended 9y agoPeople very strongly underestimate the impact on the net once many people who were hitherto disconnected, finally come online. Provided they realize there is a greater web beyond facebook and the various trap gardens.
- sarabande 9y agoSpeaking 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?
- rspeer 9y agoThe unfortunate problem is that any one of these fonts increases the amount of data your page has to load by 8 megabytes. I don't think there's a good solution to CJK web fonts yet. If one existed, I think it would need to involve a font rendering technology where character shapes can be generated from strokes and radicals, instead of the literal shape of every character having to appear separately in the font.
- Something1234 9y agoWhy can't font files be compressed, as that would just be using a dictionary which I believe that GZip already does.
- Tomte 9y agoThey are compressed. Do you perchance mean "dynamically loaded, on demand"? Because there's no standard for it. Because – as usual – "good enough for Western audiences".
- avarun 9y agoSeems like there would be demand for a font format that allows character modifiers to dynamically be applied to characters. This would allow the language to be represented digitally similarly to how it's taught in the real world, rather than as thousands of unique Unicode characters.
- Tomte 9y agoThat is at least conceptually part of Unicode. You can encode „ü“ both as the character (one code point) and as „u“ followed by „modifier Umlaut“ (two code points).
- manojlds 9y agoNice to see lot of Tamil love in there.
- ofcrpls 9y agoTamil font had a lot of work done on it in the late 90s. Especially amongst the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora who fled the nation but continued to want to read the news. Murasu was the font name I believe.
- guruparan18 9y agoTamil has the largest users in internet[1]. It does enjoy the highest adoption. 1. https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/in/pdf/2017/04/Indian-languages-Defining-Indias-Internet.pdf https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/in/pdf/2017/04/Indi...
- rajaganesh87 9y agothanks for the link.
- sremani 9y agoalso Google CEO himself being ... well, I will not go there! But the absence of Telugu font in talking about Indian fonts is eerily disconcerting.
- manojlds 9y agoTo clarify - That's % of population that has adopted, not the largest number of users.
- nkoren 9y ago> The language and script change every five hundred miles 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 much more diverse than that. 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. 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.
- Eire_Banshee 9y agoSo... the comment wasnt stereotypical enough?
- parthdesai 9y agoIn India, language and food, both change every 200km. When you tell this to people who haven't been to India, they usually think you are exaggerating but it's surreal how diverse India actually is.
- neelkadia 9y agoReally impressive! Following Ek Type and ITF since so long and happy to see great things are coming out on Indian scale.
- henrikeh 9y agoThis 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. 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! [1] Metafont: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont [2] FontLab Studio: https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio/ https://www.fontlab.com/font-editor/fontlab-studio/
- svat 9y agoSome Indic typefaces were created using METAFONT in fact, in the 80s and 90s. They used the abilities of METAFONT to provide multiple specific fonts. Some of them have features (variants for conjunct style, e.g. the “Bombay” versus “Calcutta” styles for Devanagari, etc.) that are still not present in any modern (TrueType/OpenType) font available today.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y agoBased 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.
- saagarjha 9y agoSouth India in particular has a higher literacy rate than the rest of the country, so it might take a while for this to spread.
- Epenthesis 9y agoPart of that is South India tends to be assertively anti-Hindi for various historical/cultural reasons. Given that, English is the only realistic option for communicating outside a given linguistic community.
- shripadk 9y agoIt's not exactly true. I am from the South and I love Hindi as much as I love my mother tongue (Kannada). However, the reason there are revolts to the degree it becomes National news is primarily because of the thrust of Hindi on locals. What do I mean by that? Imagine a villager or someone not versed in English wanting to fill a form in a Governmental organisation or a Bank. For a long time, most forms were available only in English or Hindi and not in the local language. This naturally pissed that section of the populace as they had no grasp of either of the languages. This felt "imposing" on them. I call it Governmental failure of either educating the masses with regards to learning Hindi or them being unable to cater to the local needs (not printing enough forms in the local language). This was in turn exploited by the regional parties who converted this issue to a language-war of sorts, trying to portray that the Central government is imposing Hindi and diminishing the local language. These "movements" were used mainly for political gain. The reason you don't see this happen in the North is because for most, Hindi is a natural fallback language as the script is similar (Devanagari) to their Mother tongue, unlike in the South.
- i2om3r 9y agoI 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.
- rajaganesh87 9y agoTamil and Devanagari scripts are close to latin? in what way? Please, can you elaborate?
- i2om3r 9y agoI didn't phrase it well. I was specifically talking about the Baloo sample and how the typographic style is the same across scripts. Sorry, I am a layman, so I don't know the proper terms, but I mean the similar stroke weight and curvature, strokes endings being pointy on one side and round on the other etc.
- duskwuff 9y ago> Can someone maybe point me to other non-Latin typefaces that have "their own typographic style"? CJK scripts have traditionally used Ming, Song, and Gothic (sans-serif) typefaces.
- i2om3r 9y agoI guess what I mean is styles besides gothic (undecorated strokes of even thickness) and those that mimic traditional calligraphy. I see a lot of other forms for Latin scripts, but for Arabic, CJK and Indian scripts most typefaces fall into the above two categories. I might be wrong though, maybe I am just not exposed to a lot of variety. I do find it most notable in mixed script printed text, e.g., Arabic, where the predominant form seems to be Naskh, which looks like calligraphy, and Latin, which typically doesn't look like calligraphy at all. This mix creates an image that looks very uneven to me, similar to when people use too many different typefaces in Latin text. Actually, I am not even sure whether the typographic style is dictated by Naskh, or whether its just the form of writing.
- wufufufu 9y agoAlright, this is cool. I was annoyed at the last Google India campaign article about how everyone was going to use voice-to-text.
- telotortium 9y agoThis 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..."
- Stratoscope 9y agoThat's not very typical. (Pun intended, and John Clarke reference intended too.) It was just a mistake. Given the topic, it's possible that that was written by someone who's not a native speaker - but whose writing is otherwise very good. (And arguably better than that showoff sentence!) As you noted, a native American English speaker would write "...a language whose reach..." And that's that. RIP John Clarke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM
- megaman22 9y agoContractions in vernacular American English are such a shitshow and getting worse all the time, that I'm not sure any guardians of proper usage can stand against the tide.
- sg0 9y agoI 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.
- elSidCampeador 9y agoऔर क्या हाल है भाई? If you're using an Apple device, you could try using a transliteration keyboard. Type in English, the word is printed in Hindi (I dunno if they have a transliteration keyboard for Bengali)
- fludlight 9y agoIs there a difference in the minimum font size that you find comfortable reading between latin and non-latin alphabets?
- elSidCampeador 9y agoOh yes absolutely. Right now I see font size 9 and I'm fine with it for the latin alphabets. For the non-latin ones, I'd prefer 11. Maybe that's just a problem with the hindi font I have right now on my Firefox (Mukta Devanagiri), in fact I downloaded that font after reading the post in the link.
- splintercell 9y agoI absolutely hate using latin script to write Hindi or to read it. I always use either the transliteration keyboard or google's absolutely amazing text-to-speech. I also believe that google's text to speech is more 'easy' for Hindi than for English. There is rarely an ambiguity in Hindi text-to-speech than in English text-to-speech. For instance, in English it would write the pun equivalent text "Crypto current seas", and later correct it to "cryptocurrencies" once it has more context, but this is rarely needed in Hindi.
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- Abishek_Muthian 9y agoLanguage 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.