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Indian language support


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  • 2 months later...

Serif needs to prioritize support for Indic scripts. This is the only reason I need to keep using InDesign. Pubisher has all the capabilities I need for our Bengali magazine published from Cleveland, OH except the support for Bengali script. Guys, this has been going on for far too long. Please, please provide support for Indic scripts on a priority, please.

When I saw today the release of Affinity v1.10, my hopes were high that Indic script support will be there. Alas, today was not that day.

Edited by solarbear
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On 8/5/2021 at 8:00 PM, solarbear said:

When I saw today the release of Affinity v1.10, my hopes were high that Indic script support will be there. Alas, today was not that day.

 

4 hours ago, Bright said:

Yeah.. really disappointed 


If such a feature had been added it would have been available for testing in the beta and it would have been mentioned in the release notes.

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7 hours ago, BushanBengaluru said:

i was thinking with major version like 1.10 will include indian languages.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @BushanBengaluru. :)

I would have been very (pleasantly!) surprised if full support for Indian languages had been added in 1.10, since it was only a ‘point’ release. I don’t think we’ll see such a major new feature before version 2.0.

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  • 5 weeks later...
2 minutes ago, Arun Sarkar said:

the "New Serif's" attitude in Indic language is not so friendly

It’s clear to me that neither the “New Serif” nor the “Old Serif” has the in-house knowledge and experience necessary for the provision of full Indic language support. That’s why they had to enlist the help of WinSoft International when they wanted to offer a version of some of the X5 products that allowed the user to work with Urdu and other “Middle East” languages.

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1 hour ago, MikeW said:

I believe Dave [Harris] has the necessary knowledge and expertise to implement Indic languages. 

You may well be right, Mike. I think the main problem with Middle East languages is RTL support (which, as I understand it, isn’t an issue with most Indic scripts). The principal stumbling block when it comes to Indic languages seems to be the Affinity apps’ current lack of support for Apple Advanced Typography (AAT), with particular reference to ‘morx’ tables.

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If they don't have the necessary expertise to implement Indic languages in Affinity products, why're they not interested in hiring someone who's an expert? India is a huge and potential market for Affinity products. Many Indian designers are willing to leave the Adobe ecosystem to join Affinity, but this is the major issue that holding them back. 

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52 minutes ago, Alfred said:

You may well be right, Mike. I think the main problem with Middle East languages is RTL support (which, as I understand it, isn’t an issue with most Indic scripts). The principal stumbling block when it comes to Indic languages seems to be the Affinity apps’ current lack of support for Apple Advanced Typography (AAT), with particular reference to ‘morx’ tables.

There's no need for AAT in order to support Indic languages. Just need to support the requisite OpenType features and for those features to be implemented properly. 

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2 minutes ago, MikeW said:

There's no need for AAT in order to support Indic languages. Just need to support the requisite OpenType features and for those features to be implemented properly. 

Previous discussions strongly suggest that morx tables are often used in Indic fonts, but what do I know?

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12 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Previous discussions strongly suggest that morx tables are often used in Indic fonts, but what do I know?

If that was a true representation of what is required, how does support of either mort or morx tables in anyway help Windows users?

I think the issue where Dave mentioned the morx table/AAT support is being confounded with what is needed to support OpenType support for Indic languages, which is supported on both platforms. 

This doesn't mean that support for Indic languages is trivial. But just that Indic language support is one of the least problematic complex ltr scripts to implement. 

It took a Quark engineer about a year to implement (not his only duty), with updates over a couple dot releases.

As far as I know, neither QXP nor ID support AAT technology. 

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2 hours ago, Alfred said:

Previous discussions strongly suggest that morx tables are often used in Indic fonts

Only in Apple proprietary fonts. (and some by misguided font developers)
The morx table is roughly equivalent to the standard GSUB table.
It is used in some Apple fonts, and for different languages.
Apple Chancery which is primarily for Latin languages has a morx table.
Apple Gothic which is primarily for the Korean language has a morx table.
Not all Apple fonts have a morx table, many (most) have standard GSUB tables (when needed).

For Affinity to support the non-standard morx table they would have to write alternate code to duplicate a bunch of functions - and for what?
To support a handful of non-standard proprietary Apple fonts?
When you have limited resources that simply does not make sense.

Note: not one of the 1,200+ Google Fonts has a morx table.
And that includes the Noto Devanagari, Bengali, and Tamil fonts.
Their FontBakery tool rejects any font with non-standard tables present.

The same goes for all other font developers that I have seen.
Certainly all the majors like Monotype, etc.
They make fonts to the standards - so they can sell their fonts to the widest audience.

Apple's morx fonts represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the thousands of fonts out there.

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  • 5 weeks later...

I can't use affinity designer due to the lack of hindi language font. Most devanagari Google fonts like Karma, Kalam etc are not supported. Due to this, I can't switch to affinity designer.

Other drawback I found out is lack of trace from image.

These 2 features are atleast expected in new age professional designer software.

Please focus on these 2 important features.

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  • 5 months later...
29 minutes ago, Bright said:

Still not in 1.10.5 :(

 

On 8/17/2021 at 11:53 AM, Alfred said:

I would have been very (pleasantly!) surprised if full support for Indian languages had been added in 1.10, since it was only a ‘point’ release. I don’t think we’ll see such a major new feature before version 2.0.

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just replying here as a vote for this much needed ability. Indic languages are LTR, which should be in the priority or if not already being tested internally by Serif. I could understand, if Serif faces RTL, e.g. Arabic, Farsi (Persian), etc.

Plus, with India's population of potential Serif products adoptees, it's no brainer that having Devanagari or the Dravidian language support soon.

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52 minutes ago, Ronald N. Tan said:

Plus, with India's population of potential Serif products adoptees, it's no brainer that having Devanagari or the Dravidian language support soon.

Film production / web development industry is huge in India and I know people in those industry use Photoshop/Illustrator so I agree with you.
 

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1 hour ago, ashf said:

Film production / web development industry is huge in India and I know people in those industry use Photoshop/Illustrator so I agree with you.

Then, since so many of the Adobe employees are from India, it would be great to see them switch to the Affinity apps at home 😁.

Paolo

 

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  • 3 months later...
On 9/15/2021 at 8:05 AM, Alfred said:

It’s clear to me that neither the “New Serif” nor the “Old Serif” has the in-house knowledge and experience necessary for the provision of full Indic language support. That’s why they had to enlist the help of WinSoft International when they wanted to offer a version of some of the X5 products that allowed the user to work with Urdu and other “Middle East” languages.

Totally understand the complexity involved, even though the details of the complexity may be beyond me. Also fully realize that if it was easy to implement Serif would have done it already. However, since this is a critical requirement for many of Affinity users, my request as before is to expedite the feature if possible. Also, is it possible to decouple Indic script support and RTL support, and have separate releases for them rather than trying to club them together?

Edited by solarbear
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24 minutes ago, solarbear said:

Also, is it possible to decouple Indic script support and RTL support, and have separate releases for them rather than trying to club them together?

It’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be possible.

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1 hour ago, solarbear said:

... Also, is it possible to decouple Indic script support and RTL support, and have separate releases for them rather than trying to club them together?

51 minutes ago, Alfred said:

It’s hard to see why it shouldn’t be possible.

Maybe not a good idea if for no other reason of splitting the applications into yet more separate applications that require yet more development time/resources.

Mainly, these are OpenType features that once added and processed by the Affinity applications present the text runs on the design surface properly. At least for complex LTR scripts. The same for RTL with the addition of handling bidi text runs.

There is nothing to be gained by splitting the applications, only downsides.

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