Available Oriya fonts

Though a Google search turns up several Oriya fonts, it is not easy to find one that is under an open-source license. A set of fonts called the Akruti freedom font collection [19] used to be available under the GNU Public Licence (GPL) from the Indian wing of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). These are apparently no longer distributed by the FSF due to copyright issues. Though I was able to locate the set through the Emacs-Indian site [20], it needs to be verified if we can continue using these fonts. Likewise, a non-Unicode Oriya TrueType font from CDAC [21], Sarala, has been widely distributed and is used by the Emacs-Indian project, I am not sure about what kind of licensing scheme is available to the general public.

Two versions of a linear Unicode font have been made available to members of the Yahoo group Orissa-IT [22] by Mr. Avarangal. The exact licensing terms are not clear to me, but from a posting by the author it seems that one of the fonts (awa22.ttf, named aAwarangal. Note carefully the distinction in spelling from the other font, aAvarangal) is available free of charge.

In 2003, Andy White posted a message to the indlinux-oriya group on SourceForge, announcing the conversion of two Akruti Oriya fonts to OpenType [23]. These were released under the GPL, and to the best of my knowledge are still open-source and free of charge. These have the advantage that they include all the base Oriya characters, and seem to have most, if not all, conjuncts, and come in two weights (bold and normal). While Rajesh Pradhan had independently started to develop an OpenType Unicode font [24], he has since agreed to focus instead on the Andy White fonts. Most problems other than cosmetic ones have been fixed, and this font is now being distributed [25] as the utkalm.ttf mentioned above. For backwards compatibility with non-Unicode-aware software, we will either use the CDAC Sarala fonts, or develop our own TrueType version of it.