The advance width of a certain type of swash character

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William
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The advance width of a certain type of swash character

Post by William »

Some readers may remember the thread entitled "An unusual glyph of an Esperanto character in the Arno font" from the spring of 2008.

viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2229

As some readers may know, I have been developing my Sonnet Calligraphic font.

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2957

The font includes a few glyphs for ending versions of characters, for example, the n at U+E5CC Alt 58828 in all versions from version 10 onwards. For each of them, the advance width is greater than for the basic letter. For example, the n at U+E5CC Alt 58828 has an advance width of 1024 font units, whereas the basic n, at U+006E has an advance width of 256 font units.

I am now thinking of adding Esperanto accented characters to the font and also having calligraphic alternate glyphs for some of them, including an alternate ending glyph for the h circumflex.

Remembering the need to add an apostrophe after the h circumflex, I began to wonder whether making the advance width of any alternate ending glyph greater than the advance width of the basic character is a good idea for the design of the font. For example, for the n at U+E5CC Alt 58828 in recent versions of the Sonnet Calligraphic font, would it be better to have the advance width at 256 font units, the same as for the basic n?

Why would one use an alternate ending glyph? I am wondering if it is only going to be at the end of the last word on a line of text and then only when that last word is the last word of a phrase, with no comma or full-stop after it.

For example, would one ever need to have a character next on the same line after an alternate ending glyph unless it is something like an apostrophe or a combining accent? I cannot at present think of an example where one would.

Do readers have any thoughts on this please?

Looking again at the http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pd ... Italic.pdf pdf document and carefully highlighting the h circumflex ending character (is that the correct parlance?) in the Alternate Latin lowercase section, Ending subsection, second row, the fourteenth character, seems to indicate that the advance width of the glyph is more than the maximum x value of the printing part of the glyph. This is reinforced by highlighting the f in the Latin lowercase section, Alphabetic subsection, where the advance width of the glyph seems to be less than the maximum x value of the printing part of the glyph.

Does any reader have the Arno Italic font? If so, could he or she possibly check that, comparing the advance width with that of a basic h, and post a note here about it please?

William Overington

17 June 2010
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