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Ol Cemet’ Metafont for TeX and LaTeX

I designed in 2002–2003 an Ol Chiki, or Ol Cement’ font for Santali, a Munda language of the Austo-Asiatic language family, that is is customarily written in four scripts — Bengali, Oriya, Nagari and Roman — depending on the geographic distribution of the Santal population across the Indian sub-continent.

Pandit Raghunath Murmu in 1920s devised the Ol Chiki, or simply Ol, script that is unline other Indic languages does not employ the syllabary pattern of the Nagari script that is common to almost all Indic languages. The Ol Chiki scirpt is fully alphabetic in nature.

Ol Cemet’ Metafont

Ol Chiki alphabet
Ol Chiki alphabet

The Ol Chiki came out by way of my fiddling with the designing of a Bangla Metafont. There is enough room for further development or tidying the codes, which works in both Plain TeX and LaTeX2e. The font has 82 characters — 10 numerals, six vowels, 24 consonants, six signs, seven punctuation marks, 28 typographical and arithmetic symbols and an empty sign mostly used for the font's internal ligature input control mechanism. And these 82 glyphs are enough to write books and common arithmetic.

Writing scheme

Ol Ciki digits are straightforward. Keying in Arabic numerals (0123456789) will produce the Ol Ciki numerals (᱐᱑᱒᱓᱔᱕᱖᱗᱘᱙). Ol Ciki vowels ᱚ(O), ᱟ(a), ᱤ(i), ᱩ(u), ᱮ(e) and ᱳ(o) and the consonants are ᱛ(t), ᱠ(k), ᱥ(s), ᱪ(c), ᱯ(p), ᱴ(T), ᱜ(g), ᱡ(j), ᱦ(h), ᱫ(d), ᱰ(D), ᱵ(b), ᱝ(G), ᱢ(m), ᱧ(J), ᱬ(N), ᱱ(n), ᱶ(w), ᱞ(l), ᱣ(v), ᱨ(r), ᱭ(y), ᱲ(R) and ᱷ(H). The vowel marks are ᱸ(\^), ᱹ(|), ᱺ(:), ᱻ(\~), ᱼ(\.) and ᱽ("). Ol Ciki punctuation marks proper are two periods ᱾(.) and ᱿(..). Other punctuation marks in the file are comma (,), semi-colon (;), opening parenthesis ((), closing parenthesis ()) and question mark (?).

Installation

The Metafont file «olc10.mf» is up for download here. The file should reside in c:\texmf\fonts\tex\latex\olcemet, or whatever, for MiKTeX distribution on Windows or system#/texmf/tex/latex/olcemet, or whatever, for teTeX distribution on Linux.

Start | Programs | MiKTeX | Maintenance | Refresh Filename Database should run on Windows or the command initexmf --update-fndb should be issued on the DOS command box.

For teTeX, texhash should be run and, perhaps, texconfig, too, with the selection of rebuild ls-R database.

The characters can be directly called from the TeX file. I wrote a style file called ocemet.sty, for use in LaTeX2e, and a font-loading macro called olfont.tex, for use on teTeX. But I have lost both the files. But the Metafont code still works. And, with a bit of tweaking in the code, it is easy to produce at least three styles — modulated, unmodulated and round-penned.

 

Rev.: vii·xi·mmxxii