How to get support for Thai into Vera?

[James Clark <jjc auth-only jclark com>]

I would like to get some advice about how to go about getting support
for the Thai script into Bitstream Vera.

Let me give a little bit of background.  The quality of currently
available Thai open source fonts is not too good in my view.  They look
OK when printed, but the on-screen is poor quality. There's no hinting. 
There's actually a separate font designed for purely on-screen display,
because the print-oriented fonts look so bad on screen.  Thai fonts all
come with ASCII glyphs, because many Thai documents mix Thai and Latin
glyphs; the quality of these is generally abysmal.

I also think it's a bad thing if a particular script isn't supported by
the fonts used as defaults in major distributions.   It tends to
marginalize users of those scripts and forces the creation of
script/country-specific distributions.  I feel the open-source world is
not well-served by every country having its own distribution.

I would like to try to address both these problems by getting
good-quality support for Thai added to one or more existing good-quality
open source fonts.  Vera seems to me the obvious choice since the
quality is very good, it has a good range of weights and styles and a
good license.

I have talked to several Thai government agencies about this and I think
there's a good chance of getting some funding if I can come up with a
concrete, not too expensive proposal.

I tried contacting the address on Bitstream's web site
(custom bitstream com) but received no answer to my email.

I would like to get as much as possible of the work done locally here in
Thailand.  Given some sort of design specification of Vera, I think it
would not be a problem to find a Thai font house that could produce a
set of drawings for Thai characters.  I am less confident about local
expertise in high-quality digitization.  In particular, I don't think
there's any local expertise in doing TrueType hinting.

Does anybody have a contact in Bitstream who I could talk to about
this?  Is it possible to get this done by a third-party? I would very
much want to get the additions folded back into the official Vera
distribution.

James
-- 
To send me mail, replace auth-only by public in the from address.