Re: Tahano Nuhicamu font (was: Re: Keyboards)

And Rosta wrote:

> Do I understand this right? You will handdraw 30,000
> glyphs, scan them in, run them through a font creator
> (presumably encoding them in Unicode Private Use Area?),
> and then use Keyman to define deadkey + 30,000
> alphanumeric strings to map to the glyphs? And you've
> already done this for 3,000 of them? How is this easier
> than Inkscaping separate glyphs for the letters and
> combining diacritics, and putting them into an OpenType or
> Graphite font? (Not merely a rhetorical question.)
No, no, no! The way I wrote it was misleading. All in all,
there are about 40 different glyphs, but they can be
combined in many, many ways due to a plethora of diacritics
[1]. As for making an OpenType font, I've tried to define
anchors where the diacritics should be placed and such, but
neither Windows nor Linux seem to care about my definitions.
Instead, the baseline of the glyphs was often there where
the anchor was set for some weird reason, or the diacritics
still came out as regular letters. I've handdrawn only those
~40 glyphs, scanned them in, read them into FontForge and
now have to combine them so that they'll work. Of course, it
should be easy to draw letters in Inkscape, but my vector
graphics skills are near zero. As for the encoding, yes, I
wanted to put my stuff into the Private Use Area, but I
noticed that it has too few character places -- only 6399. I
don't know Graphite. And right, specifying 30,000+
combinations in Keyman is just madness. But I don't know of
any other way, since my stupid computer does not allow
OpenType although it's running WinXP Pro which is supposed
to support OpenType features. Or do I need to install those
extra files for Asian writing systems? For some weird
reason, there was no Windows CD coming with my computer so
that I could install that (I had it assembled by a co-worker
of my mother's who might have forgotten to give me that CD
... not that I suspect anyone for knowingly installing an
illegal copy of Windows to economically damage the Holy
Church Of Microsoftism, which is the Greatest Sin as we all
know [2]). I guess the CD (original) of my brother won't
work with my machine due to registration and whatnot.

Carsten

[1] See www.beckerscarsten.de/conlang/tahanonuhicamu.pdf
[2] We're reading Brave New World in English lessons at the
moment, so please excuse my sarcasm ... but really,
I wouldn't suspect anyone to do that first of all.

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