R.I.P.

Jan Schmoeger

So, /napostrophe is not needed, after all. Could we (reasonably safely) get rid of some more junk in our character sets?

Max Phillips

Has anyone here ever used a per-thousand sign? A cent sign?

James Hultquist-Todd

What about the /Aringacute ? I've been doing a lot of research into several orthographies for my typeface and have yet to see that come up anywhere (besides Unicode).

James Puckett

Has anyone here ever used a per-thousand sign?

The only explanation I have ever seen for this character is that it is still used to express blood alcohol levels in Danish anti drunk driving campaigns. So I dropped it from my character set.

What about the /Aringacute

It’s unneeded. Aring is a letter and not a letter in Danish, and in Danish any vowel can theoretically have an acute, so people started putting Aringacute in fonts in case it got used for some obscure word in a dictionary. But the only thing it actually gets used for is transliterating old Norse into Danish, which requires a bunch of other characters that probably aren’t in your character sets unless you design custom fonts for Brill or SIL.

I would love to drop the Florin now that I am drawing the Indian rupee symbol for my fonts. But I think I will hold off for a year or two just in case France breaks up the Euro zone when the Germans refuse to loan them more money.

Nick Shinn

Trivia for typedrawers: Matthew Carter once went out of his way to use the per-thousand character in an illustrated talk he gave on character frequency. IIRC he was discussing how to increase the overall character count efficiency of a typeface (Fenway?) by targeting the most frequent characters for narrowing.

Max Phillips

How about the long s?

And the generic currency symbol? I worked on Wall Street for 14 years and never saw one used.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

James Puckett

How about the long s?

I think most people did away with the long s between 1760 and 1900. It’s only really needed if you’re targeting some niche market.

And the generic currency symbol?

I have never seen this used outside of high circulation financial publications. They all use custom type to suit their paper and presses.

Mark Simonson

I was once told by a Dutch interviewer that the currency symbol in Proxima Nova was poor. I had lazily used the regular weight for all weights, thinking it didn't matter, that nobody actually used it. If I remember correctly, he said it was needed for annual reports in Europe, and that a font with a bad one would never sell in that market. He seemed shocked at my ignorance. I fixed it, but I don't know if it helped sales.

Nick Shinn

Greenlandic K.
All the boxes and arrows in WGL4.

***

The danger of omitting such unnecessary characters is that some bright spark writing a layout app (or font manager) might decides that fonts won’t be OK’d if they don’t have the full set of characters for a “standard” encoding.

***

I’ve been omitting Aringacute and Greenlandic K for a while, now I will omit napostrophe too.

Craig Eliason

Greenlandic k is at least kind of fun to draw. It's these damn calculus symbols that I have no interest in putting together.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

Florin ƒ was not used in France (they had Francs), but in the Netherlands. When the Dutch are talking about the prices they had in the nineties, they need the florin sign. So I wouldn't drop that.

Long ſ was still in use in Germany and Austria in the Fifties. Plus, some people, although historically incorrect, split up the ß into ſz. I recently needed it in my thesis, quoting a text from the 1700s. It’s easy to derive from the f, so I wouldn’t drop that either.

I have seen ‰ in use in Austria a couple of times, it's part of the German/Austrian keyboard layout (opt-shift-E). And it’s not much extra work, is it?

Generally speaking, please keep in mind that there is a difference between glyphs and characters. And while some symbols are deprecated as characters, you might still have a use for them as a glyph. Then, adding the (outdated) unicode doesn't hurt. Three examples:

1. Dutch IJ/ij (U+0132 and U+0133) are merely compatibility characters, meaning they are not typed by anybody. Still, sometimes I make it a real ligature or let the J have a deeper descender. When I do that, I do use those code points, but also add something like this to the locl feature:
language NLD; sub i j by ij; sub I J by IJ; sub iacute j by iacute_j.loclNLD sub Iacute J by Iacute_J.loclNLD

2. Catalan Ldot/ldot (U+013F and U+0140), again, are merely legacy compatibility characters. What Catalans actually type is L-middot-L. I use Ldot anyway, because the dot won't be placed right. My locl feature looks like this:
language CAT; sub L' periodcentered' L by Ldot; sub l' periodcentered' l by ldot;

3. Most of you probably still use the code points for the fi and fl ligatures (U+FB01 and U+FB02), even though, according to Unicode, typographic ligatures are not supposed to be typed and stored as a single character. Their codes are there only for compatibility with outdated 8 bit encodings. That’s why you add them to your liga feature.

Russell McGorman

Guys.

Let's get a grip,

How can we bloat our character sets without those otherwise useless glyphs?

)

James Puckett

How can we bloat our character sets without those otherwise useless glyphs?

Well at least we can still list Norsk and Bokmål as different languages.

Nick Shinn

I use this for Ldot substitution (in the liga feature):

sub L periodcentered' L by periodcentered.Ldot;
sub l periodcentered' l by periodcentered.ldot;

—with the special periodcentered glyphs fitted to their purpose.
These don’t need to be in a locl feature, as the sequence only appears in Catalan, and the liga feature is well supported.
Also, the text stays intact.
But I still include the precomposed Ldot characters, as some typographers do use them.

James Hultquist-Todd

@Russell_McGorman Everyone could start supporting Janalif.

PabloImpallari

Or Futurama Alienese & Rotalics:
http://www.motaitalic.com/typefoundry/fonts/gemma/character-set

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

About the Catalan L-dot-L:

These don’t need to be in a locl feature, as the sequence only appears in Catalan, and the liga feature is well supported.

I used to think that too until at one point someone told me that a font I had produced wouldn't work in a dictionary. They used periodcentered to mark syllables, like this: syl·la·bic. That's why I believe it's a better idea to put it in the locl feature.

Nick Shinn

Good point!

Jan Schmoeger

Reiner, this nitpicking of yours is pure gold! )

Max Phillips

I've always wondered about the math symbols in the average Pro font. There seem to be a whole bunch—product, partial differential, integral, not sign—that only seem useful for setting complex equations. But a proper math font contains many symbols that aren't in the average Pro font. Maybe someone with a math background could tell me: does is subset of math symbols represented in the average Pro font actually make sense? That is, does it enable a user to set most mathematical texts without being supplemented by Symbol or Euler or something similar?

On another subject: I notice no one's spoken up for the lowly cent sign. Are we agreed this is a vermiform appendix?

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

Reiner, this nitpicking of yours is pure gold! )

Thanks. Let me know if I can do anything else to you. :-)

I notice no one's spoken up for the lowly cent sign. Are we agreed this is a vermiform appendix?

1. I’d be careful about characters people can type easily. The cent sign is included in many keyboard layouts. A user might try out your font and have the impression that your font is broken if it's missing.
2. Is the cent sign really out of use? I do come across it every once on a while, and not only in the sense of a hundredth of a US dollar, btw. I've been told it is often used to denote Costa Rica’s colon since people cannot type ₡ on their keyboards, but they can type ¢.

Mark Simonson

I still see ¢ used here and there, admittedly not as much as it used to be.

Nick Shinn

Don’t write off the appendix just yet—there are several theories as to its usefulness, even if these are secondary to its original function. For a typographic analogy, consider the @ symbol and #. A little redundancy can come in handy.

I wouldn’t like to see the cent go, because it’s not hard to draw (unlike the colon monetaire), and is quite a pretty little thing to sit next to a figure, especially as a superior.

Max, I agree about the higher math symbols

Jan Schmoeger

Max and Nick, dropping these would be indeed nice. However, I cannot help feeling that there would/could be uses for some of those. Even in prose, whether humorous or not. My 2¢ (there;):
∑ ∏ — think I saw these in text?
∞ — saw in fiction, popular use?
≈ ≠ ± — used alongside the basic operators?
∫ (integral) ∆ cannot think of any use in text or headline context?
√= heterosexual practice? I apologise ...

Mark Simonson

I've seen ∞ used on blogs to indicate a permanent link.

In my earliest commercial fonts (pre-Unicode), I used to put more useful glyphs in some of the math symbol slots—things like solid and open boxes, arrows, and stars.

I've since updated them to Unicode and given them proper code points, and restored the stolen code points to their proper characters.

I'm fine with this, but I fear that users will have a harder time finding the more useful characters, especially when there's no glyph palette available.

James Puckett

I think that when it comes to the higher math symbols the purpose of the font needs to be considered. They make a lot more sense in a book font than they do in display type, and are just pointless in a script face.

I'm fine with this, but I fear that users will have a harder time finding the more useful characters, especially when there's no glyph palette available.

How many people actually know how to type those math symbols? Aren’t they only available on Windows with alt+ sequences?

Mark Simonson

You can type all of them directly on a Mac using combination of option and shift + keys, but, yeah, most people probably don't know they're there. Unless they have need of one of them, and then it's not hard to learn. Some Mac users use ƒ (option-f) as an abbreviation for "folder" in folder names. Easy to type, easy to remember.

I left them out for a while on certain fonts where they were unlikely to be missed, but some corporate clients consider fonts to be non-compliant if they are missing (or so I seem to recall).

All this stuff goes back to early computers that had only a few fonts (or sometimes only one) that had to serve multiple purposes. And early PostScript fonts normally borrowed glyphs (via reference) from the Symbol font for the math characters, or used a single set of generic ones for every font. Do that now and you risk looking like a slacker. That was actually a pretty good solution, now that I think of it. Nobody will use them anyway, so it doesn't matter what they look like. And the font is technically complete for the compliancy police.

James Puckett

Does anybody just use multi-axis interpolation to develop these? Or just use the MM font built-into makeotf for cranking them out? Even if you tweak them a little it would probably be less than a morning of work for an entire family. This is something I have been meaning to build from existing open source fonts and Superpolator but I never get around to it.

Jan Schmoeger

Here is one: the apple (F8FF). Here's what happened in Tertre (Black, Extra Bold, etc. > Extra Light), I was getting tired or something …

.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

Or just use the MM font built-into makeotf for cranking them out?

That’s right, I had completely forgotten about this. If we’re too lazy to draw these characters we can have makeotf do that for us. The -adds option creates these glyphs if they are not present in the font:

Euro, approxequal, at, brokenbar, daggerdbl, equal, greater, integral, Delta, asciicircum, backslash, currency, degree, estimated, greaterequal, less, Omega, asciitilde, bar, dagger, divide, fraction, infinity, lessequal, litre, minus, numbersign (Numero), paragraph, pi, product, radical, threequarters, logicalnot, multiply, onehalf, partialdiff, plus, quotedbl, section, zero, lozenge, notequal, onequarter, perthousand, plusminus, quotesingle, summation

(src: MakeOTFv2.5 OpenType/CFF compiler User Guide, 20 Nov 2008)

According to the same user guide, ‘Added glyphs will match the font’s weight and width’. I remember using this option in a font last year. The liter sign was quite nice actually.