Re: Conlang Unicode Font (was Re: Kamakawi Unicode Font Question)

On 08/03/08 18:26:03, David J. Peterson wrote:
>
> Tristan:
> <<
> Your explanation of the problem is wrong, as I hopefully explained
> above. The few Latin ligatures, all those Korean codepoints, combined
> accented Vietnamese letters, the Arabic characters, they're all there
> for backwards compatibility or for political reasons. Somewhere,
> there's a character set that included it because the font technology
> wasn't able to automatically combine forms. Unicode just inherited a
> lot of characters from that age it would rather just ignore.
>  >>
>
> Okay, then let me ask a practical question.
>
> Herman's Olaetian font has, among other things, this ligature
> for when the character "g" follows the character "n".  Presumably,
> if there's a word typed "s-a-n-g-i", he'd want it to be appear as
> "s-a-ng-i", where "ng" is the "ng" ligature.  That character doesn't
> have a Unicode point (which, as you've pointed out, is as it
> should be).  For someone creating a great big font like I am,
> what should I do about this?  Should I include the "ng" ligature
> in a place that doesn't have a Unicode point (or should I just
> put it wherever, as long as nothing's being put there at the
> moment...?)?
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "doesn't have a Unicode point".
I think the answer is yes, as long as you're not giving the character
any number at all. But if you mean, should you put it at (say) U+0370
which is not yet assigned, the answer is no. That slot might be
assigned at some point in the future.

>And at that point, is there something I have to
> *do* to make it so that when you type "s-a-n-g-i", the word
> processor spits out "s-a-ng-i"?  If there is, it might be something
> that the font program I use (TypeTool 3) isn't capable of, in
> which case maybe someone else should take over the Conlang
> Unicode font project.  : \
Yes, you need to add a ligature, but I can't tell you how to do that
because I've never used TypeTool 3. Perhaps it help will describe it?

Anyway, if you're really stuck, once you've drawn all the glyphs I
could go back and add the ligatures in using FontForge as long as you
give it to me in OpenType format. I don't have the time or expertise to
actually do the drawing itself.

--
Tristan.

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