Font-related problem for linguists

[Michael Cysouw]

Thanks for the tip, Stefanie:

indeed, there is a different glyph for the italic ɑ in Charis SIL, but for some strange reason it is not turned on by default:

see http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?format=file&media_id=CharisSILVariants4.106&filename=CharisSILVariants4.106.pdf
Section "Slant italic specials"

On a mac, this is called 'slanted italics special forms' in the typography settings, 'alternate forms'. Don't expect Microsoft to have support for such features...

best
michael

On 2 Mar 2012, at 11:22, Stefanie Fauconnier wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I agree with Michael that this is a bad design decision on SIL's part.
> 
> As already mentioned it is possible to circumvent the problem by using the font features that come with Charis SIL (and Gentium Plus). As far as I know this is not possible in Word, but it is not very difficult to do this in OpenOffice (LibreOffice) or with XeLaTeX. Those who are interested in the XeLaTeX solution can read this thread: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.linguistics/2010 .
> 
> Best,
> Stefanie
> 
> On 02-03-12 10:18, Michael Cysouw wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> I really don't seen any problem here, except that SIL does not want to make a separate glyph for the italics ɑ (U+0251) in their Charis SIL font (at least, that is what Don claimed SIL said to him). Currently, the italics variants of U+0251 and U+0061simply use the same glyph in Charis SIL. I think (with many of you here) that this is not ideal.
>> 
>> However, other fonts do make a difference (e.g. Times New Unicode, or STIX, or Arial, or Helvetica), and there is nothing in the Unicode definitions that would speak against doing this. It is simply (IMHO) a bad typographic decision in the design of Charis SIL. As a general rule, I would think that two different characters should *never* have the same italic variant.
>> 
>> As for the alternate glyphs that Rik mentioned: if you are on a Macintosh, try for example TextEdit, set your format to Rich Text, set the font to Charis SIL and insert an upper case velar nasal symbol Ŋ (U+014A). Then select this symbol, open the Special Characters window (cmd+T), and select the typography options from little 'gear' symbol at the bottom left of this window. Now you can see that SIL provides four alternative ways to render this glyph. This is great stuff, but completely overkill for the italics "ɑ" problem.
>> 
>> As for Martin's suggestion to add a symbol to Unicode: no, they won't do that because IPA is considered an extension of the Latin alphabet. Also, there is already enough cruft in the Unicode specification because of backwards compatibility, not to speak of all the different A-like symbols...
>> 
>> A (U+0041)
>> А (U+0410)
>> ᴀ (U+1D00)
>> Ａ (U+FF21)
>> 𐌀 (U+10300)
>> 𝖠 (U+1D5A0)
>> 𝙰 (U+1D670)
>> Ꭺ (U+13AA)
>> ᗅ (U+15C5)
>> Α (U+0391)
>> 
>> :-)
>> 
>> best
>> michael
>> 
>> 
>> On 1 Mar 2012, at 12:03, Don Killian wrote:
>> 
>>> When I emailed SIL, they weren't willing to change the basic function of the font because they said there hasn't been a demand for it.
> 
> 
>