Yes, we can definitely merge these two fonts. Both has almost same shapes and gsub/gpos tools.

But if it required to add some rules using locl feature, then we need to extend this for may be a year. Since locl feature is not working in all rendering engine.

We are doing this for Lohit Devanagari, its working fine with pango but not working with other qt and icu.

Hi Nilamdyuti,

  Can you use Lohit Bengali font instead of Lohit Assamese and let us know what are the changes required in Lohit Bengali to properly support Assamese langauge.

I can see now on http://www.unicode.org/charts/ that Bengali code chart is under name of "Bengali and Assamese"

I am looking what community prefers

I am looking for that too. I have raised the issue to the community members. Let's see what they prefer.

The community members prefer the fonts to be kept separate. Majority of them have used or are using Lohit-Assamese and are happy with it.

Should we ask the Bengali community to test Lohit Assamese?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assamese_alphabet#Three_distinct_variations_of_Assamese_script_from_the_Bengali

If we do merge the fonts what should it be called?

Yes, you may do that. 

Majority of Assamese community members are web users and they found Lohit-Assamese to be by far the best font in all perspectives. So, they are not really in favour of a merged font since both of them are working well separately. 

But in case if you merge the fonts, what should it be called will entirely depend upon any naming standards that you follow for fonts if you have any.

Hi Nilamdyuti,

  Yes, will not merge in Fedora if community do not want it.
  But can you confirm once, is Lohit Bengali works for Assamese language?

(In reply to comment #0)
> Description of problem:
> Assamese and Bengali use same script Bengali.  Please merge Lohit-Assamese and
> Lohit-Bengali to a single font.

Hi Santhosh,

  As per comment from Nilamdyuti, we should not merge these fonts.
  other reasons are:
  1) Lang tag not supported in all locales.
  2) Most of the times language users used to be in en_US locale, in that case they cant get there language specific shapes.

  When we merged Lohit Devanagari, all forked Devanagari i.e. Marathi, Hindi, Nepali, sindhi, Kashmiri, Konkani were identical.

  But now we have found few language specific difference.

  So from next release, i will release Lohti Devanagari together supporting all language and Language specific font as well. Marathi. Nepali
  
  Lets end user decide what they want to :)

Hi Pravin,

Ok, I will check and let you know.

Hi Pravin,

Yes, Lohit Bengali works for Assamese language too.

Thanks Nilamdyuti for confirmation, i thought so :)
closing 
please reopen if any problem