A glance at any book, magazine or newspaper printed in Tamil reveals huge, uneven inter-word spaces, and frequent rivers of whitespace—issues that are not found even in closely-related scripts such as Malayalam. This is likely due to the high frequency of extra-wide vowel markers, which limit the number of locations where a line break may be inserted in a word. Yet these text layout issues are absent not only from manuscripts, but also from the earliest printed texts, such as editions of the /Doctrina Christiana/ from the late 1570s. In these early printed texts, glyphs with prominent horizontal strokes, such as ப (pa) and ட (ṭa), appear in multiple variants that differ in width, in a practice reminiscent of the use of /kashida/ for justification of text in the Arabic script. In this talk, I attempt to replicate this practice with modern font technologies, demonstrating a prototype of a variable Tamil typeface with a GEXT (glyph extension) axis, and the use of Simon Cozens’s “newbreak” algorithm to typeset well-justified Tamil text in narrow columns.
Justification of Tamil text using stretchable glyphs
