Goudy Village

John Savard

On the other hand, one probably will have to go to diamonds or round dots for the umlaut at least, so that ä, ö and ü in German and some Scandinavian languages are distinct from ő and ű in Hungarian.

ivan louette

@Christian Thalmann I think I have found the right size for accents. And I tried more "flamboyant" tittles, between diamonds and flames. @John Savard That should solve the question of umlaut.

Christian Thalmann

Looking good!

What I notice most when reading the sample is the large white gaps created by punctuation. I know it's partly due to French punctuation spacing, but I suspect also because the commas and quotes are tiny and point-like. Look at «j'ai», for example...

Given your steep accents, I'd think some large and vertically elongate commas and quotes would work well.

ivan louette

@Christian Thalmann Thanks again for your comment. The large spaces before colon and semi-colon for example are due to a wrong interpretation by Inkscape of cutted and pasted text from LibreOffice : Inkscape insert a normal space when Libre Office insert and calculate by default a narrower space. On the other hand my commas are wrongly rotated comparing to the original Village font. Before redrawing them I will rotate them right.

Georg Seifert

I don’t think it is a problem when German umlauts and Hungarian umlauts are the same. German Umlauts look exactly like the others in Fraktur typefaces. ‘We’ where just to lazy to cut proper umlauts when switching to Latin type. The Hungarians sticked with the old shape I suppose. 

ivan louette

@Georg Seifert Thanks for your advice. However I don't see any problem to incorporate hungarian umlaut too when the base drawing of the diacritics will be solved. I did it for Uccello and I will probably draw the same range of characters for this interpretation of Goudy Village.

Georg Seifert

I just meant that you don’t need to artificially distinguish them. If you end up with umlauts that would work as Hungarian ones, it is save to use them for both.

Christian Thalmann

Georg: Hungarian uses both öü and őű and distinguishes them phonemically, so if regular diereses looked liked hungarumlauts, it would be catastrophic. I suppose you could use loclHUN to replace the swashy diereses with dotty ones, but it's risky to depend on localization.

ivan louette

Just for testing. It seems it promises nice weights.

John Savard

Christian Thalmann said:

Hungarian uses both öü and őű and distinguishes them phonemically,

After verifying the truth of that with the Wikipedia page on the Hungarian alphabet, I found other information on that page which could explain why, when Hungarian was written with the Fraktur script, this was not an issue.

The page noted a number of "historic spellings" used for Hungarian before the current orthography was adopted. Among the possible past equivalents of ő and ű were öö and üü, therefore while Hungarian today needs the distinction between the two accents, Hungarian in the past could have managed without it.

Georg Seifert

I was deliberately speaking only about umlauts. I’m not so sure about dieresis. Are not square dots are useful in French? I only know about round or square ones. 
Thanks for correcting me, learned something. Do you have some info on what the difference is in usage is?

Christian Thalmann

Yes; the acute accent represents a long tense vowel in Hungarian. So őű are simply the long tense versions of öü (e.g., ö = [œ], ő = [ø:]).

Just because there is a fallback solution to ő doesn't mean your font supports Hungarian. It's like saying a font doesn't need ß because you can type ss instead.

(BTW, it takes more to support Hungarian than just the hungarumlauts. Þorsten from the German board informs me that Hungarian typographers expect acutes and hungarumlauts to have the same inclination angle, and that angle to remain constant between lower- and uppercase. If your acutes flatten in uppercase, you should probably offer steep acutes in loclHUN. Nowadays, I simply keep the uppercase accents steep by default to avoid that problem. I like it better that way anyway. Also makes it easier to place two acutes next to each other to make hungarumlaut.)

ivan louette

No problem for me, They will be easy to differentiate in this font.

Christian Thalmann

The dieresis looks extremely high up. It's usually lower than the single dot in /i/.

ivan louette

Just testing FontForge capabilities in weights. And Village seems to be happy with them.

ivan louette

I redesigned completely the accents on base of Goudy's comma design and I placed them much closer to the character. And I carefully take account of Goudy horizontal alignment and spacings. That gives a much better flow. On the other hand I have continued to test extreme weights and thins. That's so interesting with this extremely versatile typeface.