Inclusion of original Tamil uyirmeyyeḻuttukaḷ no longer used in India?

[bre73]

This is likely more of a feature request. Are there any plans to include the original forms of several consonant+vowel letters (uyirmeyyeḻuttukaḷ) that formed unique ligatures? This affects five letters (possibly eight), in particular ṇa (nna), la, ḷa (lla), ṟa (rra), and ṉa (nnna) when they combine with vowel matras for ā (aa) [and by extension o and ō {oo}] and for ai. The other three would be the letters ka, ca, and ta combining with the matras for I and ī (ii), (but I'm unsure if they're simply graphic variants or are true original letterforms).

My understanding is the script reform carried out in India did not affect Tamil users in Sri Lanka or Singapore where the language is also official. (If I'm incorrect on any of this please correct me! Thanks!)

Lastly, are there plans to merge the Noto Sans Tamil and Tamil Supplement fonts into one since they're parts of the same script? Will the supplemental characters be included in the serif fonts in the near future?

Font

NotoSerifTamil-Regular.ttf, NotoSerifTamilSlanted-Regular.ttf (Sans versions as well)

Where the font came from, and when

https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/tree/main/hinted/ttf/NotoSerifTamil
https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/tree/main/hinted/ttf/NotoSerifTamilSlanted
Date: 2021-09-08

Screenshot:

The above image was typeset in Adobe InDesign using the Adobe Tamil font family for illustration purposes.

Thanks!

[miloush]

These would be great to have via the hlig feature

[simoncozens]

This would be good, but would require a bit of drawing (the -ai ligatures look like they could be done with a component or similar as they all begin with the same stroke), so we don't plan to that this year.

Lastly, are there plans to merge the Noto Sans Tamil and Tamil Supplement fonts into one since they're parts of the same script?

That will require a lot of drawing, as we only have one master of the supplement and eight masters of the base fonts. It's a nice idea, and we'll definitely keep the issue open but I don't see it happening soon.

(Noto fonts are open source, so I'll very happily take community submissions if they are of good quality!)