How do you decide about your default character set for Latin typefaces?
Do you include Vietnamese?
Do you care for special American or Eskimo (non-English/French/Spanish/Portugese) characters, currency sings etcª?
What about spcial African characters/alphabets? Why are they catered for so little?
Are you supplying ə (Aseri) or other special characters? What is your standard set of languages to be furnished?
What is your standard Latin character set?
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I took the old Fontlab on Steroids set Tiro developed and stripped out the Esperanto characters. Then I did a lot more research to determine what languages were covered.
Nope.
Regarding American Indian and Eskimo languages, no. Regarding currency, I support the new Turkish Lira sign because Turks buy Latin fonts and the new Indian Rupee sign because I enjoy drawing it. Otherwise I ignore most stuff that isn’t already in my list.
Not all African languages have a fixed orthography, so some languages are a mess I’m not going to wade into. Others are used by people whose economic circumstances make it unlikely they’ll ever buy—or even have a use for—any of my fonts. That said, I am considering dropping ð and þ from my fonts so I can use that time designing a few extra letters with diacritical marks that could support more Africans than Iceland has residents. I should note that I regularly sell fonts to Japanese buyers—whose native writer system is different—but never to Icelandic designers.
Nope.
See the pages six and sixteen of this PDF: http://www.dunwichtype.com/pdfs/Ironstrike_Specimen.pdf
what do you mean by that?
A note about Vietnamese: support is surprisingly rare among professional fonts so offering Vietnamese in your standard set can be a differentiator.
Not so surprisingly. The potential return for the amount of work is not high. Icelandic is a no-brainer yes. Not a huge undertaking so you need far less of a return than say Vietnamese.
According to this source based on the US Census, there were almost 1.5 million Vietnamese speakers in the United States in 2011, a number that increased by 510 percent since 1980.
I find the thought of adding Vietnamese language support intimidating but now, when I see see the grossly doctored signs in front of Vietnamese restaurants I feel sad.
Vietnamese is the one big seperate Latin character set outside the Atlantic world, if I don’t something.
It seems a bit queer on the other hand to suport Icelandic and Lule Sami but not Vietnamese.
The other question that arose to me was about languages of the Amerikas (apart from English/French/Spanish/Portugese). Are languages like Navajo or Guaraní worth supporting? Is there any ‘good practice’ on that?
I'll note that the difference between AL-4 and AL-4 without Vietnamese is still about 90 characters. I have yet to add Vietnamese support to the family I've been working on most recently.
Resources:
http://www.thomasphinney.com/2014/03/fontlab-latin-encoding/
https://github.com/tphinney/font-tools
The character set I created is not a parameter as it tries to support all Latin-based alphabets. But for any "pro" font I consider Vietnamese support a mandatory feature. The language has 90 million of speakers and a long written tradition. It surely demands more work, but with components it is not a huge task. IMHO, it is completely inconsistent to build a font with Sami or old Greenlandic characters while omitting Vietnamese.
Native South and Center American Languages
As a general rule, any character set supporting Spanish and Portuguese will also support almost all native-South and Central American languages. They were not written before European colonization so the Spanish/Portuguese alphabet was used to register them. Latter researches also included other diacritical combinations, but again all already present in fonts supporting Western-European languages.
There is an issue with glottal stop, marked with an apostrophe and very common in those languages. In recent years scholars are pointing that the original sign was not an apostrophe but a similar entity called "saltillo". This character was encoded in Latin Extended-D (A78B) not long ago. So, for a completely correct support for these languages, the saltillo pair (UC/lc) is needed. Its usage is especially important for linguists working with Mayan languages, but tends to increase as fonts offer the character.
From all those languages, Guarani and Quechua are the most relevant. Guarani is official and widely spoken in Paraguay. Quechua is official in Bolivia and Peru, with about 10 million of speakers in a vast region from Argentina to Colombia. A deeper support for native-Brazilian language needs special kerning for pairs of diacritical combinations like ïï and îî, but those are for very specific languages.
Thank you VERY much for sharing your deep research on this issue. I really appreciate to learn about the G̃ debate. And completely agree with you about the role of type designers on these questions.
The sources I did consult were studies published by SIL and from the Linguistic Lab of UnB (Universidade de Brasilia). One paper even analyses just the nasalization on Guarani, where I discovered some kerning challenges like pĩtã and ãmõcĩĩ. But none of them includes G̃/g̃.
I suppose this is related not only to a linguistic split, but also to differences between Paraguayan Guarani and the Mbyá variant which prevails in Brazil. Also the difficulty to write G̃/g̃ maybe also inhibited its adoption (even the Abecedario page you linked uses Ĝ/ĝ instead of G̃/g̃, probably due to lack of OT support). For a comprehensive learning, I should had read more sources about the Paraguayan side.
Regarding the y, I now understand it is not a linguistic need but a design choice based on linguistic criteria. Thanks for clarifying.
I think it would also be sensible to cater for Azeri. There are about 26M native speakers. They use the Latin alphabet officially since the 1990ies and they need one particular extra character, the Schwa: Ə ə (018F, 0259). Enjoy drawing it!
It seems that the existence of this character as a regular part of the modern Latin writing system has not yet been noted on a general scale by font producers, however, I think it actually belongs to a char. set which also supports e.g. Turkish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_alphabet
hááhgóóshį́į́ – see Wiki
any insights?
Besides the usual resources needed to implement such stacked diacritics (combining diacritics, mark, mkmk and cmap OT features), there are two tricky issues with Native Norte-American languages.
1. Ogonek is largely used to indicate nasalization – similar to tilde in Central and South-American languages. It appears in Navajo, Apache, Diné Bizaad and several languages from Pacific Coast and Yukon region. But, contrary to Polish and Lithuanian usage, the preferable position of ogonek for a is at the bottom center:
2. Macron below and lowline are used in Northweast languages to denote the strongest syllable. As both nasalization and accent can fall on the same vowel, many times you have stacked diacritics bellow. Not only the OT support for this is almost non-existent, but you also need more room below baseline to properly position the macron/lowline with ogonek.
There was some discussion about this theme on Typophile some years ago.
Isn't that just an outcome of mechanical typewriter implementations, which overstruck the ogonek on the width of the preceding letter?
I mean the number of fonts which includes combining diacritics and OT codes is almost non existent.
When I did research (2010-2012), the only quality fonts with such support were the ones released by SIL, Language Geek and Linguistic's Software. Others available were low quality adaptations from Times, Arial or Courier, barely suitable for professional use. And the ogonek at the bottom middle was present just in a special adaptation made for a Yukon NGO.
Later Brill and Huronia joined the quality group. Now probably this improved a bit with newer OS, Reading influence and other releases. But minority non-European languages using Latin script are still far from mainstream focus.
Maybe this explains the preference origin. Linguists I did contact from Canada and USA said the bottom middle should be used, if available. Specialized adaptions of digital fonts were made this way, indicating a choice made already in OT era. For me, this is enough to include alternate glyphs/combinations for those languages.
I don't know anything about typewriters used to native American languages. It would be interesting to know the solutions adopted as an ogonek dead key linked at right does not fit /O/o/e/ while at middle it changes the European standard and also misses connection in /A/. This would also be an issue to Polish and Lithuanian.