Following is the intial email posted on Google Fonts discussion list outlining the project.
We are working on refactoring 'Abhaya' a classic Sinhala font from designer Pushpanada Ekanayake(Sri Lanka) Abhaya is the most printed Sinhala font at the moment in Sri Lanka a high contrast font that originally had two weights (Regular, Bold). Sol Matas is working on a new Latin set and we are using two Shree Lipi Tamil fonts to match with Abhaya. The work is done by Pushpananda and I'm helping him to coordinate and work with all of us contributing.
Currently we are three weeks into the project, If you would like to see the current state, just jump to my next post.
Im going to quickly sum up our development so far.
We started off looking at obvious things to fix on old Abhaya, as many old ASCII era dtp fonts, i It was in its own proprietary encoding. Drawings from 1998, with crooked outlines here and there (the CRT effect, as pushpa put it) So many points After initial discussion, Sol, sent us some samples with different fonts that she thought that could match Abhaya and Tamil we had.We sent her feedback, What we thought could work. Was a great exercise to understand the characteristics that made up Abhaya.(sample-tryouts.pdf) Abhaya Latin needs a high x height. With tamil being more Bodoni like and Abhaya being more classic, Sol suggested to tweak the Tamil a bit to match the feeling of Abhaya. As trying to make a latin that is in between would be useless. (tamil-tweaked.pdf) And we sent Sol some documents and newspaper scans so she could get a better feel of Abhaya in context, and print. Also so blogs that she can see Sinhala and Tamil in use. And we thought we could follow some of the height matrix made by Rafael Sarvia when designing his ‘Serendip Sinhala’ font. Then based on our feedback she did the first draft of Latin. (first-latin-draft.pdf) Then we started looking closer at x-height matching. with the proportions we originally worked on Latin would be really small and it already looked really small. (Please see this video for detailed description) So this was the development till last week.
After several tests and discussions we agreed on the height for uppercase and lowercase to match harmoniously with Sinhala. The width of each character and its position on the baseline have been carefully designed to get a nice balance between both writing systems. Adding large counters for optimizing on screen viewing and small ascenders and descenders.
All the files are on GitHub and posting regularly. We work on FontForge, if you would like to checkout the files just grab it and take a look. We are posting weekly meetings on YouTube and ill post the links here.