Font Forum

Timo Kähkönen wrote:

William wrote: ... OpenType glyph substitution information could be included in the pdf...
... automatic ligature substitution, discretionary ligatures and alternate glyphs...

Do you mean e.g. if the user has included characters f and i in template, the template generator program would add also ligature glyph fi AUTOMATICALLY or only if the user has MANUALLY INSTRUCTED the program to add ligature fi to some unicode code point?

Well, I was thinking that the information would be manually added to the text area of the template generating facility. Yet if there were an option to include some preset information then that could well be helpful.

Timo Kähkönen wrote: In the automatic method there should be preinstalled ligature tables and in the manual method this information comes manually from user. The table structure could be like this LigatureLeft[0]="f", LigatureRight[0]="i", UnicodePointOfLigature[0]=45321 or formatted according to Opentype tables.

I was thinking of some of the text being like that used in the viewtopic.php?t=2046 thread, in particular that used by Bhikkhu Pesala in his post which is timestamped Thu May 29, 2008 11:07 am which is currently as I write this text the last post in the thread.

Some ligatures can be of three or more characters.

In addition there would need to be some way of tagging an alternate glyph so that the software knows of which character it is an alternate glyph. For example, the system needs to know that a swash alternate glyph of a lowercase e is another version of an "e".

Yet I am not suggesting any specific ways of including the information in the pdf. I do not know enough about OpenType tables to do so. I am putting the idea forward in the hope that there will be a discussion and that people who do know about OpenType tables will be able to make a suggestion of the best way to do it.

William Overington

15 August 2008

The automatic or manual substition data could be fine feature and I suppose the implementation is very simple and may be added after examining OpenType tables.

The most critical and I think the most difficult is to enable language specific glyph selection. The technic is simple but where to find the information of which glyphs are essential to which language and are there some recommended glyphs that every font should have.

Is there one source of information or should this data be collected from various sources?

Timo Kähkönen wrote: The most critical and I think the most difficult is to enable language specific glyph selection. The technic is simple but where to find the information of which glyphs are essential to which language and are there some recommended glyphs that every font should have.

Is there one source of information or should this data be collected from various sources?

A good source is mentioned in the following post earlier in this present thread.

viewtopic.php?p=9563#9563

William Overington

15 August 2008

William wrote:

Timo Kähkönen wrote: A good source is mentioned in the following post earlier in this present thread.
viewtopic.php?p=9563#9563

I will check that.

Meanwhile you and others could play more with my template editor:

http://www.royalcomics.org/puhekupla/draw_template.php

I added there one more way to select glyphs: by USC Collection e.g. Basic Latin, Latin Extended-A, Bengali, Hebrew Extended, Katakana, Geometric Shapes.

Collection source: http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10 ... tions.html

William wrote: A good source is mentioned in the following post earlier in this present thread. viewtopic.php?p=9563#9563

Yes. I got here http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/georgian.pdf the USC ranges of Georgian language and here is the result template:
http://www.royalcomics.org/puhekupla/dr ... ,8220,8222

Maybe that could be used as the source of the alphabets of European languages. Then there are rest of the World and other glyphs such as number, accents, combining marks, ligatures, currency symbols, punctuation. Many of them are language-specific and should be included into the font.

Any ideas where to find language spesific glyphs other than alphabets? And other than European languages?

Ludwik wrote:

Erwin Denissen wrote:2 paid customers from Poland so far.

I am one of them.
I need: ą Ą ć Ć ę Ę ł Ł ń Ń ó Ó ś Ś ź Ź ż Ż

In the final two page template not all of these are included, so Polish is not fully supported by the basic edition of Scanahand.