Muthu Nedumaran Hibizcus is a suite of free and open-source font proofing and debugging tools for South Asian and South East Asian languages.
Most of the languages in these regions are written in a script that belongs to the Brahmic family, in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. This differs from a complete alphabetic script like Latin, where the vowels and consonants are treated equally.
In Brahmic scripts, when consonants and vowels combine to form a unit, the consonants may change shape or have other marks attached to them to indicate a combination. These marks can appear before, after, above, or below the consonants. This combining behavior can generate hundreds or even thousands of possible unique and beautiful letterforms in a script.
The challenge font developers have is to have their fonts render all the required forms in the correct order and position. The Hibizcus tool, by Muthu Nedumaran, presents all the combinations that are expected in a given script and, when they appear incorrectly, provides the interface to single-step through the shaping process. This allows font creators to quickly identify issues in their fonts without needing an in-depth knowledge of the script.
This presentation will introduce the various tools that are available in Hibizcus.