Muthu Nedumaran Sorbonne University, Campus Pierre and Marie Curie, 4 Pl. Jussieu. Check in 15 minutes before session start time.
15:00-17:00 GMT+2
2-hour afternoon session
Hibizcus is a suite of free and open-source font proofing and debugging tools, primarily for South Asian and South East Asian languages, but also helpful for proofing of diacritics in Latin, Greek, Arabic and Cryllic script languages.
Most of the languages in Asia are written in a script that belongs to the Brahmic family, in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. These units may change shape and become a single base form, or have other marks attached to them to indicate a combination. Marks can appear before, after, above, or below the base form. This combining behavior can generate hundreds or even thousands of possible unique and beautiful letterforms in a Brahmic script font.
This differs from a completely alphabetic script like Latin, where the vowels and consonants are treated equally.
The challenge font developers face is to have their fonts render all the required forms, in the correct order and position, for a given language. Most font tools show what is available in the font. They do not include language data to test what is ‘expected’ in a font for these languages.
The Hibizcus tool presents all the combinations that are expected in a given script and language. When the forms do not appear in the correct shape, the tool provides an interface to view the step-by-step shaping process. This allows font creators to quickly identify issues in their fonts without needing an in-depth knowledge of the script.
This workshop will introduce the various tools that are available in Hibizcus and help participants understand the proofing and debugging process. They can bring their own fonts or pick from given samples, test them against the script and language data, choose different shaping engines and look at what happens internally when various marks and base forms are shaped to render the given text.
Workshop participants are kindly asked to bring their laptops with Hibizcus app installed (it can be downloaded from App Store, more information here: https://hibizcus.com/ ). Participants are welcome to bring their own fonts to the session for discussion
Workshop duration: 2 hours
Total number of spots available: 20
15:00-17:00 GMT+2
2-hour afternoon session