Kevin Pease of Designrants points out the following excellent opportunity—which, oddly, he doesn’t wish to take!—for an up-and-coming type designer to make a few bucks and gain some experience for his or her résumé:
The project is for outputing a variant Typeface from an existing open source Typeface, where the variant is replacing only 1 alphabet (upper,lower case, basic and italic) and putting a sanskrit alphabet (upper,lower case, basic and italic) that will have to be designed.
. . .
The budget is about $100 via Paypal, Moneybookers. Delivery for early/mid-next week.
Um, I don’t know much about designing typefaces, and nothing about Sanskrit, but that sounds . . . how shall I put it? . . . extremely challenging. Still, if you’re really hard up for cash and selling your spinal fluid isn’t working out for you, perhaps this is your dream project. If so, see Kevin’s post for more details!
Via Ultrasparky.
See the followup on Ultrasparky, which links to this Web-forum message. It sounds like when the prospective client says “alphabet” he actually means “letter,” which makes the scope of the project somewhat narrower. His view is that the shape of the letter k as it’s normally written is evil because it causes people to kill themselves (as proved by Hindu scripture), and so we should write English with a font in which the evil shape of the k has been replaced with the Devanagari letter ?. To further this effort he wants to release a free font with the substitution, which everyone who writes English will surely want to switch to. So it’s not an entire Devanagari font family that’s required – only one letter, which he incorrectly calls an “alphabet.”
Wow. I was going to complain about how disappointed I am, but that explanation for why the K needs to be changed makes it all worthwhile:
Who knew?
Whether serious or a flawless joke, that link Wins The Internets Forever.
What nostalgia! The sample paragraph looks like something out of Whitney’s Sanskrit grammar, the Bible of all American Sanskrit students. And the fact that the subject was compounds which I always found confusing and sometimes incomprehensible was equally astounding. HaHa. Thanks for the laugh.
It’s from Horace Hayman Wilson’s An Introduction to the Grammar of the Sanskrit Language (London: J. Madden and Co., 1841), actually.