Tagalog as a script descriptor?

Jim Utz

I'm curious why so many of my Latin fonts show Latin & Tagalog in the script tag in Mac's FontBook. Isn't Tagalog written in the Latin Script?

Thomas Phinney

Huh. Could be either a feature, or a bug.

Tagalog was once written in an Brahmic writing system (script), an abugida called Baybayin. In Unicode, this is encoded at U+1700–171F, and simply called Tagalog in Unicode.

There are certainly some fonts that support Baybayin as well as Latin, and could be flagged as Tagalog for that reason.

If that is not it, I rather wonder if an engineer at Apple made an understandable mistake and is labeling the *Latin* Tagalog range as “Tagalog” and treating it as a separate script.

James Montalbano

I have a feeling it is a bug. When I load fonts I have created that contain Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts, FontBook identifies them as containing Latin, Cyrillic Tagalog. No mention of the Greek.