A research report on developing a unified rendering engine for the Devanagari script specifically tailored for the Nepali language, addressing character shaping and text rendering challenges.
Nepali, spoken primarily in Nepal and by minorities in India, Bhutan, and Myanmar, is written in the Devanagari script with unique typographic standards. As digital technologies grow, the need for accurate Nepali PDF generation increases. However, existing open-source tools struggle with complex Devanagari text, including ligatures, composite characters, and glyph reordering. This project addresses these challenges by developing a unified font specification with reordering rules and GSUB (Glyph Substitution) representations. It enhances the Apache PDFBox library to ensure accurate rendering of Unicode-compliant OpenType (OTF) fonts while resolving issues with older Nepali fonts. Testing across multiple fonts shows improvements in accurate rendering of Nepali text. This effort improves the glyph ordering mechanism for writing system in Devanagari script. This project enhances the accessibility of Nepali text and contributes to preserving Nepali language and culture in the digital age.