Tahano Nuhicamu font (was: Re: Keyboards)

Carsten Becker, On 12/01/2006 15:51:
> OBConlang: I'll try to make a keyboard for the Tahano
> Nuhicamu once I finished the TTF font with its *potentially*
> 4,000,000 combinations (of which I'll only need 30,000 I
> estimated) ... I've only got about 3,000 combinations at the
> moment and it needs the Tavultesoft keyboard program thing
> because it enables you to extend the deadkey function as it
> seems in that you can define a string of more than one
> keystroke plus some other string to be replaced by one glyph
> from the font. That way, I should be able to enter <[name]-
> meung> and what comes out is the pre-assembled glyph
>
>      ___       /
>    /        '    /
>    |      \__/
>  _|     .---,    ,
>    |     ,---'    | ___
>    |     |____/_      \
>            ,  ,      ___/
>             ,      /    .---,
>                    \____/
>
> (to be best viewed in Arial Unicode MS). I need the glyphs
> preassembled because the outlines of the single glyphs are
> just scans with the letters having an irregular width each.
> It's been too much work to draw everything in Inkscape. And
> the result wasn't that pretty either. Handwritten it looks
> much nicer IMO.
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.)

--And.