ISWA web font

[Jonathan Duncan]

Hi Val and List,
     I want to share what I think could be a positive move forward with 
the ISWA fonts.

     Currently there is one for use with the graphite engine developped 
by Eduardo Trápani.   It works mainly with Firefox and seems to be 
mainly intended for web. Graphite is a special rendering system that 
enhances TrueType Fonts with special rules to support complex scripts. 
Wikipedia says that: "It allows for a variety of rendering rules, 
including ligatures, glyph substitution, glyph insertion, glyph 
rearrangement, anchoring diacritics, kerning, and justification." But 
was never intented to do x,y coordinate positioning like we need for 
SignWriting, but Eduardo did manage to get it to work.

     Often times when we hear of TTF we think on the fonts we use in our 
text editors, and although the font created by Eduardo is that kind of 
font, it still needs the Graphite engine to render it. Only a few 
programs 
<http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=projects&item_id=graphite_apps> 
support the Graphite engine.  So if the bugs get sorted out it will 
mostly be used in the SignWriting community in the Mozilla FireFox browser.

     I think that a better option is to us modern web fonts along with 
specialized CSS, and javascript to render the font.  Font makers such as 
http://fontcustom.com/ and https://icomoon.io/ create several type of 
fonts so that it can be compatible with most browers.  For example 
creating a font with https://icomoon.io/ would create a "Web Open Font 
Format", "Embedded OpenType", "TrueType", and an SVG font.  They are 
fallback fonts.  If a web page can't use one type of font it will try 
the next.  They also work with PUA unicode area as does Eduardo's TTF font.

      A popular example of the icon font called font awesome 
http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/examples/

Currently they only display the font in one color only.  So we would 
have to save each shape in font and use CSS and javascript to overlay 
two characters one for each shape on top of each other to get a two 
color font we need for SignWriting.
     It would be some work to make the font and the CSS and Javascript 
but should be smaller than current fonts, be client side, compatible 
with all modern broswers, not need Graphite, not have the same origin 
shortcoming as my previous fonts had (once the font is downloaded to the 
browser cache, it should work in all web sites that use it without have 
to fetch it for each website.
So combining the work Steve Slevinski did for FSW or Unicode to show as 
SignWriting on a web page, Eduardo work with TTF and my work the 
refactorized font for the part, I think this would be the most promising 
direction for SignWriting fonts on the web.

The first step would be to put together a proof of concept and see if we 
run into any unexpected problems.  Then work through creating the font 
file and the CSS Javascript for 1 base symbol for each category.  Then 
implementing the whole font.

If anybody has any questions or comments, please feel free.

Regards,
Jonathan

-- 

email: duncanjonathan at yahoo.ca <mailto:duncanjonathan at yahoo.ca>
joyoduncan at gmail.com <mailto:joyoduncan at gmail.com>
Cel Honduras: (504)3141-1171
Tel USA: (347)875-8442
Skype: yojoduncan

SignWriter Studio <http://www.signwriterstudio.com/>


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