Syllabary Font in TTF ?

Discuss FontCreator here, please do not post support requests, feature requests, or bug reports!
Post Reply
omsec
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri May 05, 2006 3:15 pm

Syllabary Font in TTF ?

Post by omsec »

Hello,
I’m a hobbyist user and found the High-Logic Font Creator on the web. I thought the program looks good and the price is affordable.
What I want to do might look somewhat weird, that’s why I’ll provide some background information on my idea ;-)

Recently I created a syllibary script consisting of about 200 ideographs required to describe “Swiss German Language” – Swiss isn’t a real language actually, but a highly specialized dialect of the German language, which other German-speaking people usually don’t understand. Therefore, no spelling rules or whatever exists, as Swiss is written in standard High-German. My script is being used as some kind of “secret font” ;-)

The ideographs look like the ones known from Japanese (hiragana, katakana and non-complex kanji) as well as a few new glyphs I added according my own “rules”. The script isn’t too difficult to learn, since most ideographs are combinations of base glyphs (something like Radicals).

To “digitalize” my script I drew every ideograph using a pencil tablet into a single bitmap, all of these are of the same size. Then I wrote a simple program that translates some Swiss text written in Latin Letters according some rules and draws the ideographs on screen. I guess that’s something like a bitmap based font as seen 20 years ago before PostScript, TrueType and all that have become a more better standard ;-) As you can probably imagine, the quality of the result isn’t that great, because the bitmaps need to be scaled to draw the glyphs in different sizes and the technical possibilities are limited – the only way to use that text is to export it as an image via clipboard into other applications such as Microsoft Word.

The better solution might be to create a symbolic (I guess) TTF font, which is then fully supported by any TTF-compliant application. So that brings me to the following questions:

- is it possible to encode a font that does not actually exist using the TTF-Format (and the High-Logic Font Creator) ?
- How could the glyphs be “typed” if there’s no such “native” (hardware) keyboard ? One solution might be to use the symbolic table of Microsoft Word, but then it probably takes 2 days to write a simple letter…That’s why I think the better solution would be to use the TTF-Font file in a self-made program that can select the appropriate glyphs automatically and then saves a common file which is afterwards used in Microsoft Word.

Thanks for your answer. ;-)
Roger
Bhikkhu Pesala
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 9873
Joined: Tue Oct 29, 2002 5:28 am
Location: Seven Kings, London UK
Contact:

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

Since a symbol font has a limited number of glyphs and you need at least 200, you might be better off creating a Unicode font. That also allows spell-checking, which is turned off for symbol fonts.
Note: only the first 224 characters of symbol fonts will be accessible, a space and up to 223 printing characters.
For ease of typing you would probably find it easiest to assign glyphs to the usual alpha characters plus áéíóú etc. ANSI character set.

Another way would be to assign the glyphs to Greek character code-points and switch keyboards to type with the font. That is better if you want to mix Latin characters for German or English with your Swiss text.

The proper way might be to assign the glyphs to the Private Use area, but then you will need a customized keyboard to type with the font.

Converting bitmaps to glyphs is easy enough: about 300 to 500 pixels high is recommended. See my Tutorial on scanning an entire alphabet.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

There is some information about the Private Use Area in the following document.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch15.pdf

There are links for that chapter of the Unicode Standard and for other chapters of the Unicode Standard at the following web page.

http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0/

William Overington
William
Top Typographer
Top Typographer
Posts: 2038
Joined: Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:41 pm
Location: Worcestershire, England
Contact:

Post by William »

I remember reading about an interesting and possibly similar type of thing being done in relation to English.

It is called Ewellic.

http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/ewellic.html

http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/

The characters are included in the Code2000 font made by James Kass.

http://home.att.net/~jameskass/

http://home.att.net/~jameskass/code2000_page.htm

So, whilst you are entirely free to place your characters wherever you like in the Private Use Area, a practical consideration might be to have a look at the http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/ page and possibly to have a look in the Code2000 font as that has various other things in the Private Use Area as well.

You might be interested to have a look at some documents about my own use of the Private Use Area.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/golden.htm

There are some notes which I wrote about the Private Use Area at the following web page.

http://www.decodeunicode.org/w3.php?ucHex=E000

William Overington
Post Reply