Clip font

Clip fonts or split fonts are outline fonts that assign glyphs representing partial characters of the Indian scripts, especially Devanagari, at code positions intended for characters of the Latin script. Clip fonts are also a technique in use in India to produce complex glyphs for which no provision is made on existing Unicode tables. At present this technique is in use by Indian font makers on both ASCII and Unicode places. It is popular in the Indian print industry. Outside India, OpenType layout is a preferred technique to achieve equivalent goals.

Function

Top: A glyph (consonant with inherent vowel) of the Devanagari script is produced using two parts (clips), input with individual keys, where Unicode uses a single code (घ).
Bottom: A conjunct glyph is created out of three parts, where Unicode uses two codes (घय) and relies on enhanced fonts to display an appropriate ligature.

In standard encodings, i.e. Unicode, the Indic syllabograms, aksharas, are formed by a sequence of characters for either a consonant with an inherent vowel (e.g. घ gha) or for a vowel (e.g. अ a), usually in a diacritic form. With Clip fonts the inherent vowel is ignored and isolated consonant glyphs are introduced that work more like letters in European scripts, but need another glyph following them to form a complete, legal glyph.

A text written to be displayed with a Clip font resembles a kind of romanization when displayed with a normal, standard-conformant font, because the script encoding had been moved from the code (character) layer to the application (font) layer. This is similar to obsolete clip art fonts like Wingdings. Therefore the appropriate font has to be available wherever such a text is to be displayed, which almost never can be guaranteed. This severely hinders interoperability and data interchange even if the fonts are available broadly and freely, although it may be simpler for the individual author and can successfully be employed in a controlled environment. Sometimes this weakness is employed as a feature, i.e. as a kind of encryption.

History

The reason for the development and popularity of Clip fonts is the perceived complexity of keyboard layout switching in common operating system setups and actual defective internationalization capabilities in older software products. English computer keyboards are very common in India. Clip fonts users input can write Hindi and other Indic languages using those English keyboards with ease. Also it is more common in India than in most other countries that people have to switch quickly between writing in any of more than two languages in as many scripts.

Some 50 commercial fonts are available using Clip font technique and ASCII places that come with custom keyboard drivers for Indic scripts, intended to limit the number of keystrokes necessary. Since such helper software broke several times in the past with updates of the operating system, many users rather relied on higher-level hacks like clip fonts.

Clip fonts are also sometimes used for scripts that are not yet encoded in Unicode, such as the Nagari shorthand Modi. In the philosophy of Unicode, the "correct" way would be to temporarily encode these in Unicode's Private Use Area (PUA). Practical problem today users in India find is that, only English language keyboards are available in the market and so talking of any InScript keyboard is futile.

Clip fonts may fade out during the second decade of the 21st century, since, recent and coming software handles Unicode well, OpenType fonts support all the scripts and languages in question, including complex shaping, and input methods also improve.

See also

• Fonts
• Kothare fonts
• ISCII
• InScript keyboard