Revival of an ugly Bengali typeface

mitradranirban

I made MitraMono monospace Bengali font in 2002 in 3 days with 3 objectives 

1) Make a Bengali font with both unicode and ISCII encoding for Bengali , as I needed it to test my ISCII-Unicode convertor

2) Make it similar to Mangal, the only indic font supplied with Microsoft Volt as a sample,  as far as structure and open type tables are concerned. I also thought as Mangal in going to be an UI font, it will be better legible in smaller points if my font also had a similar design.

3) Make it monospace, so that it can be used to view plain text file in internet explorer, the only app that supported uniscribe in Windows 98. IE would not accept a non-monospaced font for showing plain text files. 

Due to the haste, my poor drawing skill and total inexperience in making fonts, the font made was of very poor quality, with headlines not aligning, contours in different direction overlapping leading to white spaces. Moreover making varying sizes of Bengali Characters in same width led to varying width of stems, giving an ugly look. I never thought it would be of use to anyone else. However it found an unintended use. It was the only font that could show Bengali characters in Xterm. That's why my friends of Bengali Linux Localisation project uploaded the font to Debian Linux archive and is present there since then as part of Bengali font package. 

Now when I look at the font, I find that despite its many shortcomings. it has got an old world charm of Bengali Typewriter and Metal press Bengali newspapers of mid 70's due to its use of horizontal components instead of vertically stacked conjuncts and non overlapping vowel marks.  I plan to revive the font with alignment of toplines, harmonisation of stems, removing overlaps, correct directions of contours, create a lighter version and if possible make it variable. I also plan to replace the non matching Latin Glyphs taken from GNU Unifont with a matching style latin glyphs. Any suggestion and critique in my design decision is widely welcome.

Nick Shinn

It’s perfect the way it is, charming, as you say.
And if you devote yourself to months of grinding out a slick, high-tech, monowidth typeface, it may be that people will find it less interesting and useful.