we cannot expect our scholars—the ones who most need to use this font—to have anything more than a word processor such as Microsoft Word

I would hope that you wouldn’t expect scholars to design their own documents, which is a task best left to designers. On the other hand, if all your scholars have access to is Word, then the only fonts they should have access to are Windows 95 format PS fonts — at least that opens a wide Unicode range to them.

Indeed, we do not want our scholars to design the documents. We want to take charge of that. But scholars will be responsible to provide us with the correct glyphs, since that decision resides in their area of expertise. They will be required to indicate whether a combining character should be attached, detached, or a spacing character; whether a pair of letters should be represented as a ligature or not; whether a letter should be a superscript combining character, and so forth. These are all features that are of crucial importance to them, since every variant is a clue to how the document is to be dated. Naturally, we want to provide them with the easiest way of managing a very large character set, and OpenType presents the potential for this.

Also of note, many of the special characters used are not (yet) part of the Unicode repertoire, and would need to be accessed through private-use areas until a Unicode proposal could be defined. It is likely that any accepted Unicode proposals would put the characters in plane 1, 2, or higher (i.e., beyond the BMP).

In an ideal world, MS Word would have the option to turn on advanced OpenType features. Then, when someone types the letter A in our font, he or she could choose from the eight (or so) different A’s available, without having to use cumbersome third-party applications. How far are we from that ideal world?

I’d say that you’ll be there when Vista (the next version of Windows) comes out next year. In the newest version of word, all Unicode glyphs (at least from TTF-flavor OT fonts) are accessible via a glyph pallette, right? No advanced substitutions, though… maybe in 2006.

Simon Daniels in the Microsoft Typography Group is a great goto person for questions like this. He is a frequent contributor to Typophile, but you might be able to reach him somehow over the MSTypo site.

Hi Joel, and thanks for the kind words Dan.

I have mentioned before that Office is working on improved OT support, but can’t guarantee any thing at this stage. As Joel may know support for combining diacritics via OpenType is already in Word. Drop the Windows Vista Beta version of TNR onto a machine running the latest version of Word (with all service packs) and you can create limitless kinds of bizarre attached, above and below marks positioned using OpenType. The problem here would seem to be turning this off, so that the academics can show unattached/unpositioned marks - this may be possible by just spacing the characters, although perhaps a 2nd version of the font stripped of OTL may be an option too.

The other features, ligs on or off and alternates selection will require both support and UI, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Another area to look at would be the XAML markup provided by Avalon (on Windows Vista and Windows XP) - if this doesn’t offer you the level of control you need I’d love to hear about it.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/building/presentation/default.asp...

I suppose the other option might be Mellel - not sure if they’re working on a Windows version, or if the Mac version supports your user’s requirements - http://www.redlers.com/index.html

Cheers, Si

Ole Lund once told me he thinks there’s nothing better than Mellel.

hhp

It has a following, that’s for sure. Shame it only runs on Mac OS :-(

Joel, what kind of scholarship are you supporting? I do a lot of work for Biblical and Classical scholars, and have some ideas of the issues involved and the software options.

John, Thanks for your comments. I’ve e-mailed you offlist. Let me know if the message doesn’t arrive. Best,