Eau de Garamond — a sans distilled from the essence of Garamond

Christian Thalmann

Christian Thalmann

Oh, I forgot to activate SS04: IPA support... that would have replaced the default italic /a/ with a two-storey one so as not to conflate it with /ɑ/, among other things.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

@Christian Thalmann The ɩ U+0269 and i U+0069 should also be distinct in italic. If you use the same strategy then italic /i/ can be slanted instead of cursive with ss04.

Christian Thalmann

Is ɩ used in IPA with any regularity? And doesn't the dot on i tell the difference? (Add to that that italic IPA isn't used often at all...)

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

The ɩ was an alternative to ɪ from 1949 until is was withdrawn in 1989. However it is currently used in several orthographies. The issue is not ɩ and i as such, but ɩ and i when accented. In IPA or orthographies, vowel symbols can often carry tone marks or other marks. With i being soft dotted, it may look identical to ɩ with an acute for example: ɩ́ vs. í. It would be helpful to have them clearly distinct.

Looking at the italic a bit, a few current standard IPA characters should use slanted variants: v (confusable with ʋ, also in orthographies), θ and β (the forms seem unusual for IPA).
You can add Latin ꞵ U+A7B5 as you have Latin χ and Greek ꭓ but Greek β U+03B2 is still mainly used in IPA in practice so the ss04 can make it look like ꞵ U+A7B5.
The ɸ U+0278 in italic should be slanted by default. The Cyrillic ef form seems unusual in IPA.
There’s also a problem with italic ƒ U+0192 and f in Ewe and other language orthographies using both letters.