As mentioned in
“The Imminent Paradox of New Scripts in Unicode”,
I have begun to develop Graphite fonts for several of the historical and minor scripts
that I have proposed for inclusion in the Unicode Standard. The first
of these fonts is for Khojki, which I
proposed for encoding in Unicode a few
years ago and will likely appear in The Unicode Standard, version 7.0,
planned for release in 2014.
Khojki is a medieval Indic script from the Sindh region, situated in
present day Pakistan, which is used for liturgical purposes by the
Nizari Ismaili community. It has been preserved by this minority
community for six centuries, both at home and in their diaspora. The
script has been used since the 15th century for manuscripts and since
the early 20th century for the printing of books. There are
organizations, such as the Institute of Ismaili
Studies (IIS) in London, which possesses a
large collection of materials in Khojki, and several scholars
worldwide that conduct research on these materials, that will benefit
from this effort.
I developed this font on a volunteer basis to meet the needs of the
IIS, which has a requirement for the input and display Unicode Khojki
in order to carry out their cataloguing efforts. The font, named
KhojkiGraphite, is based upon the KhojkiJiwa font designed by Pyarali
Jiwa of the United Kingdom years ago. Mr. Jiwa’s font is the only
TrueType font for Khojki; however is it based upon a legacy encoding.
Its glyph repertoire contains several consonant-vowel ligatures;
however, there are several inconsistencies with these glyph. I’ve
edited the glyphs to bring them into structural and optical alignment,
fixed metrics, and added Graphite rendering rules in order to create
the first Unicode-encoded Khojki font. At present it works in
OpenOffice and LibreOffice, in XeLaTeX and XeLaTeX, as well as in
other applications that support Graphite.
Here is an excerpt of a ginān typed in LibreOffice using KhojkiGraphite:
In order to provide users with an effective means of using the font,
Wafi Momin of IIS has developed a basic keyboard using the Microsoft
Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC). So far, the combination of the font
and the keyboard is helping IIS to carry out its projects using modern
technologies and to make their materials available in digital media
using common standards.
I will release the KhojkiGraphite font and keyboard for public testing
in the next few months. My goal is to release the package in
conjunction with the publication of Unicode 7.0, so that users have
immediate support for Khojki, even though in limited environments.