What is the South American "satillo" in shape and use?

Chris Lozos

I am adding the South American glyphs to a sans font and have never designed a satillo and am looking for advice from a native speaker.

Igor Freiberger

Not a native speaker here. Its name is "saltillo" (small jump) and it's used in Nahuan languages (mostly central Mexico) and also in Rapa Nui (Easter Island, only uppercase). My approach:

Kent Lew

At last year’s Face/Interface conference, Mexican designer Manuel López Rocha spoke about designing for indigenous South American language communities. He touched on the importance of the saltillo. I don’t find the talk recorded online. But you can view an example of his work at https://cuatroojos.com.mx/lin-diseno-de-tipografia where you can at least find good examples to infer from.

Peter Constable

For a bit of background info, see Proposal to Encode Additional Orthographic and Modifier Characters.

John Hudson

Igor’s uppercase form look pretty good to me, but I don’t recall ever seeing the saltillo aligned to the x-height like that.

Here are the Brill forms, including smallcap:

Chris Lozos

Thank you all, this helps! It appears to me then that the mark's shape follows the top part of the exclamation but is shorter? Does anyone have a link to some text with it in use that I can test with? Any glyphs it is commonly used between?

Igor Freiberger

@John Hudson Thank you very much, my lowercase position is wrong.
@Chris Lozos In the proposal to add saltillo to Unicode, there are two sample texts (pages 5-6).

Kent Lew

Also, on Miguel’s site that I linked there are some examples of real text. But you’ll have to transcribe them, as they are in images. 

Be sure to test between paired vowels-with-dieresis — e.g., nꞌanäꞌänëꞌn or xꞌëskojnëꞌëkt.

Chris Lozos

That helps greatly, Kent!

Chris Lozos

Here is what I did with it so far: