R.I.P.

Mark Simonson

Type itself is a way to draw letters automatically.

There are many opportunities for automation in type design. Automation is a design choice.

Possibilities are endless. Our time on earth is not.

Thomas Phinney

I have used cent and math-delta in real documents.

I think that Adobe should release the two MM fonts (sans and serif) built into makeotf for separate use (for those who don't want to run makeotf). I think they are a handy starting place for a bunch of math symbols that one may not want to leave out completely, but are not wanting to spend a lot of time on.

I can't remember now if I did all of the glyphs for those fonts, or just the euro. Nor whether they were based on other existing glyphs such as those in Adobe Sans and Adobe Serif....

Ray Larabie

I've been ditching Esperanto accented letters from most of my fonts and I don't feel too terrible about it. That eliminates Hcircumflex, hcircumflex, Jcircumflex, jcircumflex (also eliminates the need for dotless j), Gcircumflex, gcircumflex. Scircumflex, scircumflex. I also skip Itilde, itilde, ring acutes, oslash acutes, kgreenlandic. But I include all the usual math symbols because, when I worked in the video business, Sony would reject fonts that didn't have those characters.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

also eliminates the need for dotless j

Not if you want to do implement mark, because you need dotlessi and dotlessj for ccmp then. I do not put all possible combos into a font, but I usually implement mark, mkmk and ccmp, so users can still type everything they want.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

Not if you want to do implement mark

You don’t want to use dotlessi or dotlessj with ccmp unless you don’t care about breaking PDFs. Acrobat reads the glyph names to get the codepoints. Using dotlessi will give you U+0130 instead of the input U+0069. The same goes for ij, ldot and others.

For aringacute, it is used in Norwegian and Danish, not having it on the keyboard layouts doesn't help.

Paul van der Laan

For aringacute, it is used in Norwegian and Danish, not having it on the keyboard layouts doesn't help.

Out of curiousity: can you show a real life example of aringacute being used?

James Puckett

I remain convinced aringacute is not really used: http://www.onelook.com/?w=*ǻ*&ls=a

John Hudson

Sigh. I just composed a lengthy contribution to this thread providing the background for some of the inclusions in the WGL4 set (including aringacute), clicked the 'Post Comment' button and had my text disappear. The draft auto-save didn't even work.

John Hudson

[Oh, apparently my long explanation (and subsequent second draft) are being held for approval. James, can you explain what triggers this?]

John Hudson

With regard to the aringacute:

In the late 90s there was a CEN (European Committee for Standardisation) project to record the repertoires of characters for European countries. This involved both official submissions from national standards bodies and research of minority language requirements. In the end, for reasons that I never understood, CEN decided not to publish the document as an official standard, but the project documentation was made widely available through other channels and influenced contemporary character set development, including Microsoft's WGL4.

In one or both of the two official sources referenced for Danish, the accented vowels Ǽǽ Ǿǿ Ǻǻ were attested as 'letters which may be found in grammars or dictionaries but not in ordinary texts.' In the documentation, this class of letter was indicated in the repertoire by curly braces.

Michel Suignard at Microsoft, who was largely responsible for defining the WGl4 character set, opted for a superset of alphabetic characters for European languages, consolidating the various 8-bit Windows European codepages and extending their coverage for minority languages and for specialised texts, including dictionaries and grammars. It should be noted that WGL4 was intended as an internal Microsoft specification for extending core fonts for the operating system and for MS Office. Even in that context, portions of the set such as the line- and box-draw and shading characters were only expected to be included in monospaced fonts for the Windows console.

It happened, though, that the WGL4 set was published alongside the OpenType specification, at the time when font developers were being encouraged to extend language coverage, so became a model for many foundries seeking to provide pan-European support. The WGL4 documentation made no distinction between different classes of characters as the original European repertoires documentation had done (the initial publication did make a distinction between core WGL4 characters and those intended only for console fonts; even this distinction disappeared in later revisions), so most font developers covered it blind.

[Around the same time (1997–1998), I was involved in a research project for Microsoft that should have resulted in a dynamic database of script, language and character information that would have enabled font and software developers to make decisions about how to filter glyph sets, including being able to include or exclude characters that would not occur in daily text. The project was cancelled shortly after we got to the prototype that I demo'd at ATypI 1998 in Lyon (Microsoft managers realised just how open ended the project was, which in retrospect was a relief: I might have ended up doing nothing else with my life).]

James Puckett

I think the length of the post and the links within it caused the system to flag it as spam. It now knows that you are not a spammer and won’t do it again.

Paul van der Laan

Frode, the theoretical aspect aside, have you ever seen an aringacute (or oslashacute, or aeacute for that matter) used in a real life application?

PabloImpallari

Paul, but maybe it's like "the chicken and the egg" question. Who came first?

They are never used in real life:
a) Because people doesn't want to use them? or...
b) People do want to use them, but the glyphs are not present?

Even if they are in fact present, they are difficult to access. Most layman people already find it difficult to use the different quote styles... let alone those obscure diacritics (Ǽǽ Ǿǿ Ǻǻ) given that the default keyboard layout its the USA layout in many computers.

For example, in Argentina, many people have trouble to find the /at or /ntilde keys in the keyboard. Because the keys in the physical keyboard are not always mapped to the software keyboard layout .
It's pretty common to find "Spanish" keyboards, but they use the USA configuration, and as a result, the keys doesn't match.... a not only diacritics: punctuation is also all shuffled around (the period key will give you a comma, the comma will produce a colon, etc...)

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

ǻ ha

in http://no.wiktionary.org/wiki/avere

Ǻ tilpasse seg en ny kultur–et helserelatert spørsmål[...]Ǻrsaker til varierende helsestatus

on pages 13 and 27 among others of this document

[...], følte jeg det var riktig ǻ fortsette studiene i Norge

in that page

Ǻ kunne snakke bedre

in that one.
I'll stop there but, yes, there aren't that many more. For Danish it seems a bit harder but Google is your friend.

Philip Taylor

Max Phillips asked "How about the long s ?". Well, I am a type user, not a type drawer, so perhaps my views may not be considered here, but as a type user I can assure you that long s is indeed needed; a book that is in preparation as I write uses it faithfully in the transcriptions of a number of letters, and the author draws attention to its use.

Christian Thalmann

Don't dump the ſ! I'm using it in the official orthography of an alternate-history conlang of mine, Jovian. ;o)

James Puckett

Ditching the long s was good enough for Benjamin Franklin, so it’s good enough for me.

Jason Pagura

The apple (F8FF) was part of the old MacRoman encoding. It was included with early Laserwriter fonts, but somewhere I don't remember I was told that the Apple inc. logo should appear there only in fonts licensed and distributed by Apple inc. You could draw an apple that doesn't resemble the Apple inc. logo if you want, or something else. I've been using it as a spot to place my foundry logo.

The ¢ is still in use in the United States for amounts less than $1.
ƒ may continue use for the Caribbean guilder of Curacao and Sint Maarten (successor to the Netherlands Antillean guilder), and possibly the Aruban florin. Small markets; may still be useful for those reporting their overseas holdings, but those people would probably use the 3 letter abbreviations.

Drawing a drachma symbol is really hard, as the script form rarely relates to the rest of a font, so I'd like to drop that. What are the odds of Greece dropping out of the eurozone?

Filip Blazek

We do a lot of type setting in my office, especially scientific books for a publishing houses focused on sociology and history. Those texts are full of math symbols, Greek characters and other special symbols, they also contain very complex equations.
‰ – yes, this character is frequently used in the Czech language, especially when dealing with alcohol level in blood but also in scientific books.
ſ – yes, longs is sometimes needed, the last time I need it was in a book with a lot of quotations of middle ages texts, they tried to keep the original spelling.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

I used ſ in my philosophy thesis. I had to quote an 18th century text.

BTW the glyphname/PDF problem is not a problem with Acrobat anymore, it remains a problem with Apple’s Preview.app though.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye

> BTW the glyphname/PDF problem is not a problem with Acrobat anymore, it remains a
> problem with Apple’s Preview.app though.

One aspect of the problem lies in the PDF generation not in the consumption.
Some PDF generators use what is sent to a virtual printer, and that’s just glyphnames.
Acrobat will output garbage if the PDF is garbage.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

That’s right. If you make a PDF with Distiller, it won’t work. Save as PDF in Apple’s Print dialog and the Export as PDF command in most Cocoa apps lose the character information as well.

If you export it directly from a halfway recent Adobe application, like InDesign CS6, or use Acrobat Pro for PDF generation, the character stream is embedded, and can correctly be reconstructed from within Adobe Reader.

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

Quoting myself from 2.5 years ago:

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. 

I do not do this anymore. Now, I have a solution very similar to Nick Shinn’s. I also add periodcentered.loclCAT and periodcentered.loclCAT.case to the font. I poked Georg, and Glyphs now auto-generates the locl feature when these glyphs are present. But there are still some problems (and solutions), I summarized them in an update to this tutorial.

Wei Huang

@Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer said:

I do not do this anymore. Now, I have a solution very similar to Nick Shinn’s. I also addperiodcentered.loclCAT and periodcentered.loclCAT.case to the font. I poked Georg, and Glyphs now auto-generates the locl feature when these glyphs are present. But there are still some problems (and solutions), I summarized them in an update to this tutorial.

How do you do this with both Ldot and ldot along with periodcentered.loclCAT and periodcentered.loclCAT.case? 

Ermin Međedović

Yes.

script latn;

language CAT;

sub  l periodcentered' l by periodcentered.loclCAT;

sub  L periodcentered' L by periodcentered.loclCAT.cap;

Wei Huang

But he mentioned he did this along with:

language CAT;
   sub L' periodcentered' L by Ldot;
   sub l' periodcentered' l by ldot;

Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer

/Ldot and /ldot are simply in the font for legacy reasons, but the feature only has the contextual periodcentered solution.

Christian Munk

About the ǻ, I have never once seen it in Danish texts or in dictionaries. Neither have I encountered it in my linguistic studies. I suppose it could be used in Danish (in theory) to differentiate the verb <sǻ> [sɔːˀ] the past tense of see or present tense of sow (as in plant seeds) from the conjunction or adverb <så> [sʌ] so or then. But that is not reason enough to have it as a precombined character. But I guess Unicode assignations are forever...

Michael Jarboe

Rainer, I'm curious how your CAT feature is different than Nick Shinn's?

I wasn't aware of this CAT language issue (thought simply that /Ldot - /ldot was actually used), but looks like I'll be implementing a solution from now on.

*Edit* Looks to me after reading the Glyphs Catalan Punt Volat page that the 'Spacing Solution' is most sound.

Michael Jarboe

I tried to look up info about /Aringacute lately. I didn't find much, and with Typophile down, I couldn't access the thread on this topic that I vaguely recall. /Aringacute bothers me not because of it's obscure use, but because it effects vertical metrics. I don't like the idea of an obscure character or seemingly unused character effecting my font's vertical metrics, lol.