Re: Gwr script

At 12:47 AM -0400 07/07/02, Roger Mills wrote:
>And so back to conlanging. I've just put up a very preliminary version of
>Gwr script-- http://cinduworld.tripod.com/gwr_script.htm  (thats
>"gwr_script").  Comments/critiques/bashing etc. more than welcome, indeed
>appreciated, as I'm not 100% in love with it yet.  But this does capture the
>basic idea.
I like it. Of course I like scripts which are "multilinear" --
scripts which show information on parallel lines. I've thought off
and on about creating such a script, but then the cultural
assumptions behind my usual projects don't really allow for writing.
Ustekkli is going to have a written tradition, but I've already
decided to use the Latin alphabet with the addition of thorn.

I wonder, though, why the vowel symbols appear under the consonants
rather than on them; the consonants consist basically of a figure
with a baseline extending to the right -- above that baseline would
seem to be a logical place for the vowel symbols:

C V
C
CCCC

I like the tone arcs as well.

>I wonder if it will be possible to make a font for it???? (For Kash, I
>managed to get the small vowel symbols to appear inside the "L" character,
>but Gwr will require a lot more tinkering than that, if it can be done at
>all with High-Logic's FCP-- which I now plan to buy).
I can think of a way to make this work in Fontographer; the vowels
would be characters which have negative width so that they overlap
the character to the left. Since each vowel would appear at the right
edge of the consonant (or a fixed distance from the right edge) this
would work without too much effort.

The tone arcs would work similarly (negative width), but you might
need several versions of each to accomodate the varying width of
consonants.

This might be an interesting project to try at home ...

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb