Dunno about your legal issues, but have you tried using Doulos SIL? As a linguist, it’s always sufficed for me.

Peace,
JT

I agree with JT, start with a font like Gentium or Vera Serif, which have clear open-source like licenses.

Cheers, Si

Speaking of BT Vera, DejaVu has been mentioned here before and might be useful.

I have a lot of respect for those devoted souls, including Victor Gaultney and the folks at SIL, for producing fonts with extensive diacritics such as Gentium, Doulos, etc.: Unicode has little practical use without fonts that actually implement the many characters for which it standardizes encodings.

However, I work as a typesetter, and need to offer customers more than a handful of typeface choices. Sure, I can suggest editors persuade authors to submit manuscripts with Sanskrit diacritics rendered in Time Roman Ext. However, journals that have always used, say, Monotype Baskerville, would like to see those diacritics rendered in Baskerville; and, by the way, as journals increasingly move on-line, they’d like those diacritics coded in Unicode. I can tell editors that Monotype might not be a good choice, on grounds its current font licenses both forbid modification and require additional licensing for electronic publications, and point out that there are other fish in the sea. And for some projects Gentium, SIL Doulos, or Times Roman Ext really might work very well. But for many jobs designers will insist on more variety.

Scholars are certainly grateful for fonts with large character sets, but I’m also pretty sure they don’t want all their publications to look the same. And from a practical point of view, I doubt universal fonts will ever be the answer: as readers of the Typophile forums know better than most, adding ever more characters is not trivial. I think instead that typesetters, and the scholarly world in general, need a variety of fonts that can be expanded as required for a particular piece of text.

Judging by their font licensing, I think Adobe understands this. I’m also encouraged by Adobe’s push for SING glyphlets, developed as a means for adding characters without actually modifying the underlying font. Some such facility is essential for setting East Asian languages, where large dictionaries contain more characters than almost any font. I have heard very little about glyphlets recently, but I’m hoping Adobe will migrate the technology to versions of InDesign other than Japanese.

It has been mentioned that Adobe doesn’t mind adjusting fonts for ’private use’, but, as this is to be put in books, that seems stretching their indulgance quite a lot, even though this new font has no commercial purpose on itself.

The wording in Adobe’s font FAQ is that modification for “customary and internal business use” is permitted, provided that the modified font isn’t distributed. Whether selling books printed using that font falls within that is hard to tell, but the general drift of that part of the FAQ seems to be that it’s OK as long as you are neither selling nor otherwise distributing the modified font software - i.e., that the font file itself is staying “internal” to the business. Or at least that’s what I’ve assumed, since I’ve had to do similar work (although for epigraphy rather than linguistics). I’d be interested to know if anyone knows otherwise.

When I’ve had to do this with fonts from vendors that don’t allow modification, the obvious workaround (assuming I need to match existing glyphs for parts of the shapes) is to print out specimens and draw my own outlines around them, and generate the new glyphs in a stand-alone font. I’d never distribute those either, but it does get around the license issue if you don’t use their vectors at all.

Naive question: Could’nt you just ask Adobe if they mind? I don’t think your niche project - sorry, I know it is important - would curtail their profits.

David, thank you for correctly assessing the situation! I do not know enough of glyphlets to tell if this could work — perhaps the forthcoming new version of the CS Suite will have integration for those.

I don’t think your niche project — sorry, I know it is important — would curtail their profits.

Au contrare. That’s why I prefer to use the term ’supplemental font’, even if it means I get into trouble mixing base font with my characters, and I am suppressing the urge to modify the original one.

“Important” ... I think it’s pretty important books look good. Using another font for some characters Does Not Look Good. I am not sure if the readers appreciate the effort; best case I can imagine is that they never even noticed!

In my view you paid a licence fee for the use of a typeface (at least I guess you did…). If you want to extend that with stuff you made that would not make a difference. It’s usage is still within bounds of fair use.

Example: years ago I combined a regular font and an expert font so I would have old style figures in the base font. For good measure I added a few dingbats (using spots for glyphs that would never be used in this situation). This way I could use ONE font instead of THREE when doing the layout of a magazine. Of course I paid for all three.

You can put your conscience to rest, Theunis.

. . .
Bert Vanderveen BNO

Theunis,

Linguists definitely appreciate the effort. Though as a side question, do you simply flip and forget for some of the IPA or do you rework the weights and proportions etc?

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

.. do you simply flip and forget for some of the IPA or do you rework the weights and proportions etc?

Simple flips whenever possible ;-)

The weights of individual pieces of ’jigsaw’ glyphs are as close to the base font as possible, but since they get repositioned I do take care heavy stems do not end up on ’the wrong side’ of lighter stems. It is not unusual that I refine a character after seeing it in print — that’s usually a case of proportions that apparently didn’t work.

A definitive disadvantage of this labour of love is the urge for constant twiddling!