I made a tool to add "post-binary" ligatures to a font, what are your thoughts?

roipoussiere

Hello, this is my first message on this forum. I'm very new in the typography world, but I like to make experiments related to typography.

These last days I worked on a tool used to patch a font in order to automatically add "post-binary" ligatures (the idea of such ligatures comes from these fonts: https://typotheque.genderfluid.space/), used to show both masculine and feminine french agreements.

Here are the previews of some patched fonts:

Lobster :

Chilanka:

GFS Artemisia:

Source: https://github.com/njourdane/post-binary-font-patcher

I would like to have some feedback on this project and how it could be improved, in terms of typography or else.

Thank you!

Thomas Phinney

I think just the tiniest bit more vertical separation between the elements would be helpful.

My own first thoughts are that this is more conceptual fun to make a point, rather than something people would actually want to see in everyday use. I find it so distracting that I would not easily absorb the content of the text. But I will be curious to hear what native French readers think!

The docs for the font patcher seem a bit bare. Unclear how one might modify the list of ligatures generated, or even where that list is.

roipoussiere

Thank you for your message.

I take note of the advice concerning the vertical spacing between the elements, I will try other values.

I'm not going to use it everyday, but I think it may be ok interest to some people in feminists or lgbt communities, which care more about gender-neutral texts, and might appreciate this over the readability, for an event poster for instance.

Some french readers are more conservationists and will not like it, probably.

Yes for now it's a bit tedius for an end-user to install and use the project, and you must use a command line interface. I will improve this in the next versions. The list of ligatures are defined in the ligatures.json file.

For now I'm trying to get rid of the FontForge dependency and use FontTools instead, this will allow to package the projet for an easier installation.

Yves Michel

I'm a French (Belgian) reader and I don't like the word "conservationist" you use to describe people who won't like it.
Being a "progressist" doesn't include the demolition of the French grammar and orthography, on the poor excuse of feminism or lgbtism. The "écriture inclusive" (inclusive writing) is already a poor attempt on the same way.
I'm definitely a readabilitist.
This personal opinion certainly doesn't concern your original efforts in typography, ligatures and OpenType features.
Cordialement!

Craig Eliason

Spacing needs attention, even more so in between the root and the endings. 

I’d be curious to see what it would look like if the endings “branched” rather than hopped up and down—that is, if the top ending slanted up and the bottom one down. 

I do tend to think that this idea is more easily and more appropriately executed at the level of type layout than type design—that the typographer, not the font, should be arranging the effect. But I’m all for experimenting!

michele casanova

@roipoussiere From the GENDER-NEUTRAL LANGUAGE in the European Parliament Guidelines:

Grammatical gender languages (such as German, Romance languages and Slavic languages), where every noun has a grammatical gender and the gender of personal pronouns usually matches the reference noun. As it is almost impossible, from a lexical point of view, to create widely accepted gender-neutral forms from existing words in those languages, alternative approaches have been sought and recommended in administrative and political language. [...]
Also, replacing the generic masculine with double forms for specific referents (‘tutti i consiglieri e tutte le consigliere’) has gained acceptance in many languages. (p. 5)

Solutions that reduce the readability of a text, such as combined forms ('s/he',
'him/her'), should be avoided. (p. 7)

Just to check, I did a quick test for Italian (in Italian there are only about twenty-five cases for masculine/feminine ending combinations), creating an opentype feature (e.g. 'e//i' to show the corresponding combination). Obviously the weights for the combined characters are still to be optimized.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

I think this can work for short text, like on a poster or on one line. For longer text, it’s difficult to read. Generally, people should write the way they can speak, it’s not clear how to read this.

Other than that, this is useful to see what works, or for whom it does.

It’d be fun to see it for variations of English spelling, like -ize/-ise, -our/-or, -ce/-se, -ogue/-og, etc.

John Hudson

Maybe just ditch the concept of linguistic gender?

John Butler

Somewhere someone is inventing a programming language with post-Boolean logic.

roipoussiere

Spacing needs attention, even more so in between the root and the endings.

@Craig Eliason Spacing between root and elements varies depending of the word (ex. musicien.ne vs voisin.e on Lobster), so it's more complicated than just modifying a value. I could however improve this by adjusting the spacing according to the glyphs bounding box.

I’d be curious to see what it would look like if the endings “branched” rather than hopped up and down—that is, if the top ending slanted up and the bottom one down.

It's an interesting idea, but the fact that the two ending are straight allows me to have acceptable results whatever the font, I don't think it will be the case with "branched" behavior.

I think this can work for short text, like on a poster or on one line. For longer text, it’s difficult to read.

@Denis Moyogo Jacquerye I totally agree, mainly because long texts are written in small font size, so the small elements will be harder to read. As I said it's not for everyday use.

It’d be fun to see it for variations of English spelling, like -ize/-ise, -our/-or, -ce/-se, -ogue/-og, etc.

Here is a patched Lobster preview with american/british ligatures:

It highlights the spacing problem between root and elements, I definitely need to improve this.

Maybe just ditch the concept of linguistic gender?

@John Hudson I'm not in control of this.

Thank you for your comments! I had some friends try some patched fonts, they didn't about ligatures and it seemed a bit magical for them, it was nice to see their reaction.