Florin vs Latin small letter F with Hook U+0192

[Deleted User] · May 2020

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André G. Isaak · May 2020

Most fonts don't contain the characters necessary to support African languages, and in such cases it is simply a currency symbol. If you want to support African languages I'd say you should supply separate glyphs using 'locl' since the glyph for the guilder isn't normally going to be appropriate to use as an alphabetic character.

John Hudson · May 2020

I always design it as if it is the lowercase letter, even if only including it in a font for backwards compatibility with the codepage support for florin, i.e. I don't give it any special treatment as the currency mark, either in terms of slanted style or alignment with numerals, tabular spacing etc..

Although the gilder is no longer an active currency, the florin symbol may still occur in documents, but the f-hook form of U+0192 is acceptable for this use, whereas stylised florin forms are not useful as the letter.

Of course, to be useful as a letter, this character also needs its uppercase counterpart, and other diacritic letters used in the target languages. I take the view that any font I create might get extended to support any language, so even if I'm not supporting Ewe in a first release, I still design U+0192 as if it is the letter, since this will cause fewer problems later.

There's no really good way to support both forms in a font. Probably the least disruptive would be to make the letter form the default — since it is the more important to get right —, and have a florin version as a stylistic variant. I wouldn't try to handle either with a locl substitution.

[On the subject of language-specific substitutions, though, note that if your italic font has a descending, hooked form of f as default, as is often the case for European languages, you will need a variant with either no descender or with a straight descender for Ewe, since f and f-hook are both used and need to be distinguished.]

John Hudson · May 2020

My Dutch client Brill publishes books that include the f-hook letter and also books that include the florin sign. I asked them how they wanted this to be handled, and they said they were okay with the letter form being used everywhere.

[Deleted User] · May 2020

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Michael Rafailyk · March 13

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That's terrible that we can't read the original question. However, I may understand the privacy requirements. Anyway.

We have the discussion on Glyphs forum about fhook.sc, and I would be very grateful if someone could confirm or deny the suggestion that the small caps version of uppercase Fhook should be different from the small caps version of florin currency symbol.

Ray Larabie · 12:17AM

I found it on archive.org. Here's a snapshot of the message:

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5019405/uploads/editor/ph/hazk3c86glep.png

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye · 5:22AM

the small caps version of uppercase Fhook should be different from the small caps version of florin currency symbol

@Michael Rafailyk One is a small Ƒ, the small-cap of a letter, and the other is a small ƒ, the small-cap of a currency symbol.

Michael Rafailyk · 9:01AM

So, to differentiate, thanks.
To be clear, I mean that the font will contain both and their design is different.

fhook.sc
florin.sc

And c2sc feature will look like that

sub Fhook by fhook.sc;
sub florin by florin.sc;

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye · 9:44AM

This is mixing two approaches. Users who use Ƒ and ƒ as letters would get an incorrect florin.sc (designed like a small-cap currency symbol) when applying c2sc when they’d expect it not to change like other lowercase letters. What about smcp, does ƒ become fhook.sc or florin.sc?

Either Ƒ and ƒ are letters, or ƒ is a currency symbol.

Michael Rafailyk · 12:44PM

So, there should be 3 different base glyphs – Fhook (uppercase letter), fhook or florin.loclEWE (lowercase letter), florin (currency) – where florin (uni0192) will be substituted by lowercase fhook (or florin.loclEWE) in locl feature for Ewe language.

script latn;
language EWE;
lookup locl_latn_ewe {
	sub florin by fhook;
} locl_latn_ewe;

And respectively, there should be 2 different small caps – fhook.sc (letter), florin.sc (currency).

smcp feature

sub fhook by fhook.sc

c2sc feature

sub Fhook by fhook.sc
sub florin by florin.sc

Is it correct?

Kent Lew · 2:17PM

There are several African languages that use ƒ fhook, not just Ewe. It may not be realistic to try to catch all with {locl} substitutions (especially since texts may not be reliably language-tagged).

I would suggest that if a font is supporting African languages by including Ƒƒ letter pairs, it would be better to make the fhook the encoded default. The florin currency symbol is probably used much less than the fhook from the perspective of language speakers.

Probably the best way to support the currency in this circumstance would be with a stylistic set, I should think.

Denis Moyogo Jacquerye · 3:30PM

That works.

I’d recommend making the letter the default for ƒ instead of the currency symbol, and have a stylistic set for the currency symbol. Some fonts have a contextual substitution before or after digits.

The currency symbol had multiple forms in practice, including letter-size upright f with hook.

Then the Ewe letter is also used in other languages like Avatime, Lelemi, Nyangbo, Tafi and Waci, some don’t have an OpenType language system tag and locl feature support is patchy at best. Additionally one may use words or names from those languages in other languages, for example an Ewe place name or person name in English text (like Turkish Erdoğan).

John Hudson · 4:26PM

I’d recommend making the letter the default for ƒ instead of the currency symbol, and have a stylistic set for the currency symbol.

That’s best, given the situation. Obviously Unicode should never have unified that encoding in the first place.

The currency symbol had multiple forms in practice, including letter-size upright f with hook.

The font that displays in the Typedrawers’ comment input/edit field has this descending-straight form on my system:

Florin vs Latin small letter F with Hook U+0192

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