An unusual glyph of an Esperanto character in the Arno font

[William]

In the http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/multiple-images-per-character/2057/1 thread I mentioned that I had found an unusual glyph in the Arno font.

I included the following, writing about the glyphs in the following pdf.

http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/ARNP/ArnoPro-Italic.pdf

I noticed also an ending version of the Esperanto ĥ character. Wow, that is a potentially very rare usage item, so rare as to inspire special interest.

Perhaps the inclusion of the ending version of the Esperanto ĥ character in the Arno Pro-Italic font will inspire the authorship of an Esperanto poem which could be set in Arno Pro-Italic so that the glyph can be seen in use. A situation of typography inspiring creative writing? Or does such a poem already exist?

I note that Arno Pro Regular also has an ending version of the Esperanto ĥ character.

http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/ARNP/ArnoPro-Regular.pdf

The reason that I suggest poetry is that it might otherwise be impossible to have a word end in ĥ in Esperanto. In poetry one may drop the final o of a noun and replace it with an apostrophe, not pronouncing the o.

I happened to find an Esperanto root ending in ĥ in the following page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_vocabulary

I noticed the word monaĥo (monk) and I thought of the possibility of having a poem ending with a line such as the following.

En la ĝardeno de monaĥ

That means, “In the garden of a monk”.

So, given that the Esperanto word kaj (pronounced so as to rhyme with the English “sky”) means “and”, I am thinking that a short poem could have the names of some medicinal and some culinary herbs, in the following form.

, kaj ,
, kaj ,
, kaj ,
En la ĝardeno de monaĥ

Should the ĥ be followed by an apostrophe to imply the poetic omission of the o suffix? In that case, would a font with an ending version of the Esperanto ĥ character need a kerning pair of ĥ with a curly close single quote character? Or would it be alright to omit the apostrophe as there is a circumflex accent on the ĥ and the two floating items, accent and apostrophe might look wrong together?

I find it interesting that I have partly written a poem in Esperanto inspired by the glyph complement of the Arno Pro Italic font. A poem that might well never have been written if the Arno Pro Italic font had not had the ending version of the Esperanto ĥ character.

A situation of typography inspiring creative writing.

William Overington

18 April 2008

[William]

As some readers may know, Esperanto uses the following accented characters.

Ĉ Ĝ Ĥ Ĵ Ŝ Ŭ ĉ ĝ ĥ ĵ ŝ ŭ

As far as I am aware they are used only in Esperanto.

The following document has various glyphs for Esperanto accented characters.

http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/ARNP/ArnoPro-Italic.pdf

I found it interesting both as to what is included and what is not included.

For example, the ending version of the ĥ character already mentioned is included.

There is also an ending version of the ŭ character.

Although there is an ending version of the g character, there is no mention of an ending version of the ĝ character, though maybe it is in the font and just not in the pdf.

There is a complete set of six swash capitals for Esperanto, yet the swash alternates section for lowercase has no Esperanto characters listed in the font. There are swash versions of g, h and j and, bearing in mind the design of the swash alternate for â and the designs of the ordinary glyphs for ĝ and for ĵ, it seems like swash alternate versions for ĝ and for ĵ might well be straightforward to produce. However, bearing in mind the design of the swash alternate version of h, there could perhaps be problems in designing a swash alternate version for the ĥ character if it were to be based on the design of that swash alternate version of h.

An interesting aspect of the design of the glyph of an ĥ character from font to font is that sometimes, as in the Arno font, the circumflex accent is above the top of the ascender, yet sometimes it is included at about the same height as the circumflex accent of the glyph of a ĉ character, yet positioned such that it is not touching the ascender.

William Overington

19 April 2008

[William]

An interesting typographic aspect of the matter is that, given a poem with which a typographer could use the ending version of the ĥ character, how exactly is that done?

There would seem to be two broad approaches, one approach is to use an OpenType font with an OpenType-aware application such as InDesign; the other approach is to use a Unicode Private Use Area encoding for the glyph and an application which can accept Unicode Private Use Area codepoints yet need not be OpenType-aware.

The Arno font is made by Adobe. Here is a link to an Adode blog posting about Private Use Area codings and Adobe fonts.

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2006/05/eliminate_priva.html

The use of alternate glyphs is a similar, yet different, matter as regards the use of glyphs of ligatures.

With ligatures, in Unicode there is a mechanism for being able to leave the use of ligation to the font, or to specify that a ligature should be used or that a ligature should not be used. Yet for alternate glyphs there is, as far as I am aware, no regular Unicode method so as to include a swash glyph version of a character or an ending version glyph of a character at plain text level.

On the matter of Esperanto roots ending in the ĥ character, I have thus far found four. There is monaĥ- meaning monk, monarĥ- meaning monarch, which is next after monaĥ- in the Esperanto-English dictionary which I have, eĥ- meaning echo, which I guessed at and checked in the dictionary, and pibroĥ- meaning pibroch. I found the latter root almost by chance as I was leafing through some of the pages of the Esperanto-English dictionary which I have, wondering if there were any more Esperanto roots ending in the ĥ character and I came across pibroĥ- with the note that it is musical. I did not know the word pibroch and looked it up on the web and found various links, including the following.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pibroch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pibroch

http://www.thepibroch.com/

I tried a draft, in English, of a poem which could, if translated into Esperanto, use the ending version of the ĥ character at the ending of each line of the poem.

A soft and lingering echo
In the garden of a monk
Of a great and magnificent pibroch
Played before a monarch

Yet quite how such a poem would be typeset, using the ending version of the ĥ character of the Arno font at the ending of each line of the poem, is of interest. It would appear that there is no plain text way for the author of such a poem to indicate that the ending version of the ĥ character of the Arno font should be used. Also, it appears that if a pdf of the poem were produced, then the ending version of the ĥ character of the Arno font would be displayed on screen and printed. However, I am wondering quite what would happen if a copy and paste were made of the text from the pdf. A plain text paste would produce just an ordinary ĥ character. Yet I wonder whether a paste special facility exists, or might in theory exist at some future time, so that the alternate nature of the glyph of the ĥ character could be carried in the pasting operation.

So, a thread about an unusual glyph of an Esperanto character in the Arno font, yet which hopefully will also produce interest in relation to its wider context of exactly how, both now and for the future, fonts and computer systems handle alternate glyphs for characters.

William Overington

29 April 2008

[William]

Some readers might like the following link to a thread about the Arno font which is in the same blog as the http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2006/05/eliminate_priva.html thread mentioned previously.

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2007/04/arno.html

William Overington

29 April 2008

[William]

I have now produced some Private Use Area code point allocations for various glyphs, one of which is for a lowercase alternate ending glyph for the ĥ character. They are in a post in the following thread.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/glyph-transformer-scripts-and-the-private-use-area/2131/1

William Overington

23 June 2008