Florin vs Latin small letter F with Hook U+0192

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André G. Isaak

Most fonts don't contain the characters necessary to support African languages, and in such cases it is simply a currency symbol. If you want to support African languages I'd say you should supply separate glyphs using 'locl' since the glyph for the guilder isn't normally going to be appropriate to use as an alphabetic character.

John Hudson

I always design it as if it is the lowercase letter, even if only including it in a font for backwards compatibility with the codepage support for florin, i.e. I don't give it any special treatment as the currency mark, either in terms of slanted style or alignment with numerals, tabular spacing etc..

Although the gilder is no longer an active currency, the florin symbol may still occur in documents, but the f-hook form of U+0192 is acceptable for this use, whereas stylised florin forms are not useful as the letter.

Of course, to be useful as a letter, this character also needs its uppercase counterpart, and other diacritic letters used in the target languages. I take the view that any font I create might get extended to support any language, so even if I'm not supporting Ewe in a first release, I still design U+0192 as if it is the letter, since this will cause fewer problems later.

There's no really good way to support both forms in a font. Probably the least disruptive would be to make the letter form the default — since it is the more important to get right —, and have a florin version as a stylistic variant. I wouldn't try to handle either with a locl substitution.

[On the subject of language-specific substitutions, though, note that if your italic font has a descending, hooked form of f as default, as is often the case for European languages, you will need a variant with either no descender or with a straight descender for Ewe, since f and f-hook are both used and need to be distinguished.]

John Hudson

My Dutch client Brill publishes books that include the f-hook letter and also books that include the florin sign. I asked them how they wanted this to be handled, and they said they were okay with the letter form being used everywhere.

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