Why project "base-sinhala"?

Most of Sinhala publishers, websites and blogs still use the ASCII Sinhala fonts for their articles. And only mostly available unicode correct Sinhala font is "Iscola potha". "Noto Sinhala" came in to play recently. However these two are the only fonts available for Sinhala writers. That is the main reason why publishers do not like to use unicode fonts. If they use unicode fonts their designs gets limited to two fonts.

ASCII Sinhala is only good for viewing and printing. It cannot be used with text to speech engines, cannot be indexed by search engines and cannot be viewed on devices where font installing is not possible. Due to above reasons we need to replace use of ASCII Sinahla with unicode Sinhala fonts. For that we need more unicode Sinhala fonts created.

Major barrier in unicode font creation is lack of technical knowledge. Most designers do not posses the scripting knowledge that needs to compile a unicode font. Our aim here is create a end-to-end build system for Sinhala font creators. The project will consist of two parts.

1. Creating glyph interpolation system- Designers only draw two master glyph sets. Then those two has to be interpolated to generate glyphs with intermediate weights.
2. Create font build system- Sinhala font should be compiled with open type rules for character spacing and character replacing. This part of project need language expertise and more research. So it will be completed end of August.