ttf-tmuni for Debian -------------------- Extra notes from upstream maintainers History Tibet Machine Uni began by taking the Tibet Machine typeface originally created by Tony Duff over the course of many years, and then was significantly transformed from 2004-2007 with many hours of work by Chris Fynn and Nathaniel Grove to become the font it now is. In this process, many glphys have been added, and many changes made to the original Tibet Machine font that affect its look. While THDL has tried to remain true to the original design, the changes have been extensive. One rationale driving these changes is that Tibetan fonts are now increasingly used for Web pages, which is not a factor previous developers had to worry about overly much. A few changes have been noted below. Baseline in Tibetan Machine We moved the baseline up in Tibetan Machine Uni to match the height of the Latin glyphs. There is indeed a hanging baseline tag in the OpenType spec for scripts like Tibetan so that if you reduce the font size of some of the Tibetan text the glyphs should move up to match the (top) baseline of the surrounding larger Tibetan glyphs. Unfortunately this aspect of OpenType is not yet supported anywhere (unless it is in Vista) and there are not yet any are practical tools to implement this feature in a font. Of course this is something which should be fixed as soon as practical and the results tested to see if it works -we have always been aware of it. Previously Tibet Machine had the baseline set so that the top of Tibetan characters at the position of the bottom of Latin Glyphs (which is also incorrect). Though this makes it easier to format Tibetan texts (pecha) it is impractical in a font which also contains Latin glyphs, and impractical to use in web pages where Latin and Tibetan script text is mixed. The previous design appears to have focused on serving the formatting of pecha, whereas with TMU we are trying to address web pages as well. Space Space was reduced for similar reasons - so that it would work with the Latin glyphs as well. You can always insert two spaces to get larger spacing for Tibetan and there are now also a number of space characters of different sizes included in the font which may be used. It may be possible to automatically have a larger space with Tibetan than with Latin by including a contextual substitution for space based on the surrounding glyphs. Size The size of the glyphs was initially about the same as the original Tibet Machine font. We ultimately changed it so that "12pt" Tibetan more or less visually matched 12pt Latin type in a typical Latin font like Times New Roman after consistent feedback that the glyphs were too small. This is intended to help with Web pages where it is sometimes difficult to control the size of a font and Tibetan would have displayed much too small. -- Tom Soderlund , Fri, 6 Jun 2008 23:27:01 +0800