Public Domain: New font for teachers.

[Jowaco]

I followed Mike Thompson's tussles with his MikeHebrew font, here, in the FC forums, and in the newsgroup comp.fonts. A postage stamp is far too large on which to write what I know of Hebrew fonts, but I wish I could help him. I hope he succeeds in his quest for a solution.
So, thank you Mike, this is a spin-off. Something I've been searching for for some time.

In the newsgroup comp.fonts, Josef W. Segur <jsegur@frontiernet.net> posted (in reply to a post from Mike Thompson):

.......................A simple approach would be to import the glyphs from a Public Domain font, for example Tuffy by Thatcher Ulrich, available at <URL:
http://www.tulrich.com/fonts/ >.

To save trouble:
http://www.tulrich.com/fonts/

The font I now put forward for teachers, is TuffyMH3. M=modified extensively and characters added. H=auto-hinted using TypeTool v.1 (obtained from a cover-disc on a UK 2004 magazine).



I've taken all the care that I can, to fashion this font, and I believe it will be useful for teachers in UK, North America, Western Europe and elsewhere. Perhaps more could have been made of composites?

I hope it is of good enough quality for typesetting and publications. I can only test with Windows ME, Word 2000, and a few other applications. It has given no trouble.

This font remains in the Public Domain. Only the filename has been changed and a comment has been placed in Format -> Naming -> Advanced to indicate the changes.

I would appreciate your comments.

Direct download here.

Joe.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Hi Jo,

I like the font outlines, it is looking good.

I probably destroyed your font for you, but you can take a look here at my changes and see if you like any of my ideas.

The # looked too wide
The upright 9 looked unbalanced
I used composites for the accents and gave the diacritics a bit more breathing space, using the smaller cirumflex modifier and caron accents, and narrow diaeresis so that vowels are all the same width
I used compostes for sub/superscripts and fractions
I added the rest of the fractions 1/3 1/6 etc,
How about adding cube root, Omega and Integral?
I combined oe again to make œ diagraph as that seemed distorted
I used composite for ellipses.
Double ,, base quote was lower than single

[Dick Pape]

Is there no end?

Seems from my font display, some of the small characters need slight bolding: ©®™¹²³ªº -- I can't tell if they are composites, but they lost weight as they were reduced in size.

Love picking on someone else's work!

Very respectfully, however,

Dick

[Jowaco]

Thank you both for your replies and advice. I've accepted all of it and adopted all except the change of digit 9 glyph which has to remain as it was for reasons other than aesthetic considerations. Excellent advice indeed. The new font is TUFFYMH4 available here.
I wish I were as knowledgeable and dextrous with composites as Bhikkhu Pesala. I'm sure it would save me a lot of time.
I've never known you anything else other than 'repectful' Dick!

Thank you.

Edited:

Some final improvements made. Same URL.

Joe.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Jo,

Check out the Letter Database to see which other languages you would like the font to support. Since adding letters with diacritics is now so easy, there seems no reason not to add them for almost all languages. Adding characters for Vietnamese would be several hours work, but perhaps there are some other languages like Polish or Serbian, that might be worth supporting.

If you need some help, I would glad to do it for you. There is a tutorial here.

I added a whole load of accents, including those required for Pāli, Classical Sanskrit, and Welsh. The fractions still needed a little bit of tidying up, so I made them all the same width. You will need to rehint the font again.

There are still some characters I haven't filled in from Latin extended B as I am not too sure what is needed. You can download the font from here

Update: I added a couple of characters for Welsh that I missed earlier, plus several others using stroke overlay, double grave, and inverted breve. That just about covers Latin Extended B, apart from some that need drawing if they are worth adding at all. (Some are used in Skolt Sami others in African languages)

I wish I were as knowledgeable and dextrous with composites as Bhikkhu Pesala.

Adding composites is very easy, knowing which to add or which to omit is more difficult. You will have to have a good knowledge of your target audience. For this font, since the target audience is the whole of Europe and education in schools, I think one should try to support all European languages at least. I added support for Pāli and Classical Sanskrit for the benefit of students of Buddhism.

For most composites, you need just two guidelines, one for lowercase, one for uppercase (some fonts may need four to position ˉ and ˜ accurately.*) Align all* lowercase accents touching the lowercase guideline, then those composites won't need adjustment vertically. After inserting all the characters you want, complete composites. If any are missing, it is because the accents needed to compose them are missing. Add the accents, and try again. Then check all composites for alignment.

Some composites like T stroke, H cross-bar, etc., will need adjustment to the width and position of the stroke. Make the composite simple, and use the transform toolbar to centre the cross-bar or stroke. Then combine the contours using "Get Union of Contours."

The integral sign could do with smoothing out.

[Jowaco]

Thanks again Pesala (hope it's not too familiar a mode of address?)

This certainly makes the font more usable in very many languages, some of which I know nothing about. I have left the font simple (see my edit in the last post) but there is no reason why others should not have a choice. We can't be accused of being parochial whichever font! Thanks also for the information on the use of composites. I've vowed to improve my skills with them.

What would we do without you?

Joe.

[William]

A useful resource on the web for lists of accented characters needed for the languages of Europe is at the following web page.

http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/index.html

The links are arrange alphabetically in section 1.2.2 Alphabetic index of languages which is about half-way down the document.

The lists are each in a pdf document. For example, the list for Welsh is in the following pdf document.

http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/welsh.pdf

The list for Esperanto is in the following pdf document.

http://www.evertype.com/alphabets/esperanto.pdf

There does not appear to be one for Pāli and Classical Sanskrit, though it is a list of the languages of Europe, so such documents are not to be expected in that list.

However, a list of the accents and any special punctuation marks needed for Pāli and Classical Sanskrit would be useful so that people can add those accents into their fonts straightforwardly using the list if they so choose.

William Overington