forum

[Mia Kalish]

This is the general idea; but as they say, the devil is in the details. 
I don't do much with Open software; I really just don't have the time. 
Also, I have so much fun hand-designing fonts :-) again, not something I
have a lot of time for these days, but still. 
One of the things I would really like to have, and have done the preliminary
work on but not completed, is a conversion utility that will take in the
font maps for ornamental fonts and convert them to working fonts, i.e.,
those that support useful functions like spell-check. 
To finish the project means mucking through the Word hex rep and replacing
the font characters appropriately. 
Sigh. 

I am trying to create a pdf of that email from the other day, but I deleted
Contribute, and it seems to have wiped my FlashPaper. I tried reinstalling,
but it is looping somewhere and doesn't actually get to the print. Double
Sigh. 
Mia


-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham
Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 3:08 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

On 29/02/2008, Mia Kalish <MiaKalish at learningforpeople.us> wrote:

>  I'm a little confused on this one. If we imagine power users who are
using
>  the Combine function in UC to create composite characters, then there
aren't
>  really any font developers directly involved.
>  What I noticed when I was modifying fonts is that you cannot directly
copy
>  and  paste the components - which is essentially the same as the Combine
>  function.
>  I don't know how you would create a diacritic that would be in the right
>  position for the wide "a" and also - without horizontal adjustment - in
the
>  right position for the "i".

You need to build an opentype, aat or graphite font.

I'm not a typographer, so take my following comments as indicative,
not authoritative. For OpenType fonts, my understanding is that for
each character you want to add combining diacritics to, you would
create anchor points in each character glyph. separate anchor points
for diacritics above and below the base character. You can also add
anchor points for combining diacritics for those languages where you
need to stack combining diacritics.

In VOLT you'd create the rules to position the various diacritics to
the anchor points. You'd be interested in the following GPOS features:

* MarkToBase attachment (mark): attaches a combining mark to a base glyph.
* MarkToMark attachment (mkmk): attaches a combining mark to another mark.

>  There's also the serifs issue: Serif vowels tend to be much more regular
in
>  size than non-Serif vowels . . . that isn't really a font design issue
>  either, unless we want to eliminate one or the other (just kidding).
>  Can you explain what you see here? How you see the designers and software
>  people solving this issue so it becomes automated?

I may be mistaken but what you describe is a design issue, when a font
developer is creating the original design of a typeface.

I though size of fonts would differ from font to font based on the
font metrics the font designer chose to use with any particular
design.

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
lang.support at gmail.com