Font Forum

A new character was added for the Turkish Lira, Currency Symbol, when Unicode 6.2 was released. This may be required by anyone doing business with Turkey, and obviously required if doing business in Turkey, so you might like to add the symbol to your fonts. Design on Wikipedia

Below are a couple of designs from my fonts, Kabala and Cankama, compared to the pound sterling sign.
If you intend to add it to a lot of fonts, or to all future fonts, you might like to update CompositeData.xml (make a backup first in case of errors) to add a definition for Turkish Lira. This speeds up the design process. Complete Composites will insert a pound sterling sign at an empty glyph if it is mapped to code-point 8378 (or added using Insert Characters), using the same metrics for side-bearings and advance width. Make it simple, then modify the glyph as you wish, to make it suitable for the Turkish Lira design. The code should be inserted after that for Indian Rupee at the end of the Currency symbols, and before:
<!-- ¶¶ Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols -->

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:I recently added the Turkish Lira to my fonts

I meant to ask about that when I first saw your other thread. Shouldn't the bottom stroke, as part of a half anchor, be a quarter circle?

Alfred wrote:

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:I recently added the Turkish Lira to my fonts

I meant to ask about that when I first saw your other thread. Shouldn't the bottom stroke, as part of a half anchor, be a quarter circle?

If you look at any of the Unicode Charts, its says: “The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code charts are not prescriptive.” In other words, the font designer can draw the glyphs in any way that he or she thinks users will recognise. Not being Turkish, I cannot say if the designs are "right" or not, but in my opinion the £ ₤ and Turkish Lria should all look similar.

The Technical Specification on this page is highly prescriptive, which might make users think there's only one way to design it, but I think it should match the Typeface. It is, after all, used in text with other characters as are all currency symobls, It is not like the Estimated Sign, which has no bold or italic variants.

How would you write it with a calligraphic pen, for a font like Embassy Script?

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:How would you write it with a calligraphic pen, for a font like Embassy Script?

I think I would write it with a varying stroke weight, like the pound sign in that font. In that particular case there is no question about the upward curve of the bottom stroke, but point taken!

Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:...How would you write it with a calligraphic pen, for a font like Embassy Script?

Somewhere between the attached perhaps? Font names are part of the filenames.

The Leander Script capture is Adobe's Turkish Lira for that font.

Mike

This is how I might do it — compared to the £ and € sign. I might even keep the strokes horizontal.