Typophile - Building a CE font (adding diacritics) - Comments

You would use the ‘ccmp’

John Hudson — Thu, 8 Dec 2005 18:07:29 -0800

You would use the ’ccmp’ feature for this kind of substitution (but note that the combining acute should follow the base letter).

Alternatively, you could use GPOS mark positioning, which would be much more flexible. In this case, you would need to have a dotless j glyph in the font and use a ’calt’ feature lookup to substitute this for the regular j whenever the letter is followed by a combining mark glyphs.

So from a practical point of

Eben Sorkin — Thu, 8 Dec 2005 14:28:47 -0800

So from a practical point of view what does Dutch & Danish propensity mean for Opentype? Unless I missed something many of the possible ’stressed’ versions of glyphs are not in unicode yet.

Would it be a good idea to use a feature code like ’liga ’to refer an app to a jacute glyph if the user types acute & then j? Would you do that for all the letters? Are there other diacritics that you would need to do this for too?

twardoch — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 02:26:54 -0700

Hrant writes: "I've read this about Dutch too. What other languages have this wonderful feature?"

In grammar books (for foreigners) and in dictionaries for Russian, acute over vowels is used to indicate syllable stress (so-called "oodarenye"). In Russian, the syllable stress is quite arbitrary. For example, when a verb is declinated, the stress can move from the first syllable in singular forms to last syllable in plural forms etc. The stress is very prominently pronounced: for example, an unstressed "o" sounds almost like a short "a" (something like shwa), while stressed "o" is a very round and clear "o". Therefore, one needs to learn the proper stress for each word. When I was in school, we usually read Russian texts from textbooks where the stress was marked. Later, when we switched to reading unmarked normal texts (in newspapers etc.) it turned out to be a very difficult task

For comparison: in Polish, the syllable stress is almost exclusively at second-last syllable. There are relativerly few words, many of them of foreign origin, which have a different stress (e.g. third-last syllable), and many people still put it the stress to second-last syllable in these words.

This may be the reason why spoken Russian sounds quite lively while spoken Polish sounds rather dull (an opinion that I actally agree with

Adam

hrant — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:46:05 -0700

Sdiboghag

pablohoney77 — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:40:21 -0700

you mean r

hrant — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 14:55:27 -0700

Peter, are you saying that the "j" can get an acute outside of an "ij" pair? Wow. What about other letters?

> I mean stress in terms of syllable inflection

Sure, the acute can't set off things like book titles, but it's still highly useful.

> One could e

John Hudson — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 14:15:34 -0700

For one thing it makes italics much less relevant.

I mean stress in terms of syllable inflection, not articulatory stress such as might be indicated, for an entire word or phrase, using italics. Marking syllable inflection means indicating which syllable carries the stress: P

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 14:04:16 -0700

Hrant: Probably not, but I don't know. I wasn't directly involved in that part of the character set definition. I am however responsible for the addition of the litre symbol to the standard Pro character set.

T

peter bilak — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 13:47:24 -0700

>>Any Danish vowel can be marked as stressed > I've read this about Dutch too

Not only vowels, but also some consonants: jacute for example. It indeed is used for stressing the word, same like italics. Most often it is used in Advertising and in expressive text, not in handwriting, as far as I know. In words like JIJ (you), one could put an acute on all characters.

hrant — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 11:25:40 -0700

Did you ask a decent Danish linguist?

hhp

Thomas Phinney — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 11:21:39 -0700

Actually, we asked a lot of people (though obviously not enough or not the right ones). I guess this is something we should look at fixing in the future.

Cheers,

T

hrant — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 11:21:30 -0700

> Any Danish vowel can be marked as stressed

!
I've read this about Dutch too. What other languages have this wonderful feature? Why doesn't anybody talk about it? For one thing it makes italics much less relevant. Do people actually use it in handwriting? It's so sad that technology has made a language less powerful. It wouldn't be the first time of course, but it's still sad.

hhp

John Hudson — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 10:35:05 -0700

/aringacute/ is a Danish letter (along with the equally obscure with /aeacute/ and /oslashacute/). It is not often found in modern texts, other than dictionaries and grammars, because it was not available in the standard 8-bit character sets intended for Danish and many people got out of the habit of marking stress in Danish. Any Danish vowel can be marked as stressed, hence the need for these characters.

I'm afraid I'm somewhat to blame for the Adobe Pro set not containing this character. Adobe asked me about the /aringacute/ when they were defining their set, and I told them that it wasn't used anymore except in dictionaries and grammars. Since the height of the uppercase form causes vertical metric problems, they decided not to include it, although my advice is now that it should be included because it is still an official character in the Danish orthography. Also, I didn't really realise that Adobe were asking only about the /aringacute/ and not about the other Danish diacritics /aeacute/ and /oslashacute/, so the Adobe Pro set contains the latter but not the /aringacutre/.

peter bilak — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 08:14:15 -0700

John, i've looked at your .ENC file, it looks identical to what i use and thought supported all european languages, the only difference is the presence of 'aringacute' in your file. I haven't encountred this letter yet, which language uses it?

John Hudson — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 23:15:08 -0700

I've actually updated some of my FL resource files since Adam compiled the first FontLab steroid. I don't think the Latin Basic set is modified though, so the steroid version should correspond pretty closely to what I provided here today.

Building a CE font (adding diacritics)

Marius Ursache — Mon, 19 Jan 2004 14:32:47 -0800

Hi,

Where can I learn more about how to add diacritics to Western fonts? (I need to create a CE version of an existing font).

Thank you very much!