Wider "big cakras" are needed for wide pasangans.

[mahalisyarifuddin]

Just discovered that these fonts are publicly available, and I can't help but test it!

Overall, these fonts are so good! But there is something I want to tell about, generally for all Unicode-based Balinese fonts, and especially these two fonts.

The second conjunct of RA ("big cakra") is one of the interesting glyph of Balinese. I tested it with many Unicode-based Balinese fonts, and all of them shared the same issue: they're struggling with the wide conjunct consonants ("pasangans").

I put the screenshots below just for the two fonts.

First line: ᬤᬶᬬᬦ᭄ᬜ᭄ᬭᬸᬧᬸᬢ᭄ᬓᭀᬧᬶ (Dian nyruput kopi, English: Dian sipped a cup of coffee)
Second line: ᬜ᭄ᬜ᭄ᬭ ᬜ᭄ᬜ᭄ᬭ᭄ᬬ ᬩ᭄ᬩ᭄ᬭ ᬩ᭄ᬩ᭄ᬭ᭄ᬬ ᬔ᭄ᬔ᭄ᬭ ᬔ᭄ᬔ᭄ᬭ᭄ᬬ ᬖ᭄ᬖ᭄ᬭ ᬖ᭄ᬖ᭄ᬭ᭄ᬬ
(By the way I'm using Windows 7 64bit and Chrome 76.0.3809.132. Firefox 69.0 results the same.)

Because there is only one width of "big cakra" (and also second conjunct of RYA), they're only works well with the narrow conjunct consonants. And as we can see above, the "big cakras" tend to overlap the wide conjunct consonants (especially the conjunct of NYA, it's indeed tricky to handle wwww)

Though the Sasak consonants are also wide, Sasak consonants are essentially Arabic consonants, and Arabic language features almost no extensive consonant clusters, so yeah.

I really hope this issue could be solved and these two fonts are getting better. I mean, they're so beautiful!

Thank you for reading!

[kamholz]

Thanks for these comments. I'm glad you like the fonts! We're still making various improvements as people encounter things like this. Actually, Vimala already has two widths for big cakra and it chooses the narrow one to go around narrow gantungan like ta, as in "ᬓ᭄ᬢ᭄ᬭ". But as you've observed, the available cakras are not wide enough for certain gantungan in both fonts.

The thing is, I'm not aware of any actually attested text in aksara Bali that requires gantungan nya plus big cakra, so it's kind of hypothetical. Do you know of any cases where it's definitely needed? The example you gave ("Dian nyruput kopi") is Indonesian, and in any case you can solve it by putting pepet between nya and ra.