Martyr Mar Thoma Odo bishop of the Chaldean church in Urmi during WWI, Rabi Edi Alkhas, Rabi John Alkhas, Rabi Koorosh Benyamin, Rabi Shlimoon Salamas, Rabi William Sarmas, Rabi Benyamin Arsanus, Rabi William Daniel and all other great names of modern Assyrian literature. I would also like to mention the name of my teacher and the editor of GILGAMISH magazine during 1950s in Tehran: Rabi Nimrud Simono.
I hope a new generation of writers and poets will be raised in Syriac communities that would continue their work on Assyrian language and literature.
Recently with the help of ISA BENYAMIN Assyrian caligraphist I developed a complete set of Eastern Syriac fonts. I would like to introduce these fonts for public use. However, I should mention that these fonts are under modification. Another point is that I am not expert in METAFONT language, therefore the program might not be written in an efficient way.
The main parameters of the program are the following:
1) box: this paremeter is the size of shweeta of
Eastern Syriac alphabets. The height of fonts is seven
shweetas and the depth of fonts is two shweetas.
2) slant: This parameter determines to what extent and in what direction the alphabets are italic. slant:=0 produce normal fonts. Use slant:=-1/4 or slant:=1/4 for italic fonts in two different directions (clockwise and counter clockwise).
2) Producing PK file:
type gftopk assy.300gf and press ENTER.
This will produce assy.300pk file.
Now you can use the fonts in a TeX file to produce Syriac texts. Note that you should change the above mentioned parameters and repeat the whole process to produce fonts with different size and slantness.
Note that you might need to do some extra steps to modify your system setup. For example in .cshrc file you might need to change the set up for XDVIFONTS variable. You might also need to change the setup for printer or creating a .dvipsrc file.