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

Tristan McLeay wrote:
> 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.
I really ought to give FontForge another try, maybe I'll get lucky and
have success installing cygwin this time.

Still, having the ligatures defined in the font is only of theoretical
interest if Uniscribe doesn't support them. Most Windows programs that
support ligatures do it through Uniscribe (SIL's WorldPad uses Graphite,
which is more versatile than the OpenType tables that Uniscribe uses,
and easier to work with as well).

It's hard to believe that in 2008, we still have to put up with lack of
support for font rendering features. Much of the problem comes from the
design of OpenType, which consists of a collection of ad hoc features
for specific scripts rather than a more generalized system like
Graphite. To support new scripts or new features, someone at Microsoft
actually has to add it to the software and get it out in the next
version of Office or Internet Explorer.