Latvian

Fonts and More Font Related Information
1

A recent thread in the Unicode mailing list, August 2005 archive, on Latvian reminded me of the 1 May 2004 when 10 countries joined the European Union, bringing the membership up to 25 countries.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch

A lady from Latvia was interviewed and she was saying that it was important that the Latvian language be continued in use, also saying that Latvian is an ancient language.

This got me interested in the idea of supporting Latvian in fonts. I already try to support Old English and Welsh in my fonts, including all of the rarer accents for Welsh.

I am not a linguist and I do this from a typographical standpoint.

I rely upon a valuable resource on the web for finding which accents are used in which languages.

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

For Latvian the following file is provided.

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

In order to learn more, I study that document in conjunction with the following document.

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf

I am now wondering exactly how to add the special characters with the commas into my Galileo Lettering font. The accented characters for Latvian appear at a quick look (though subject to a more detailed checking) to all be in the start up template of Font Creator 5.0, though as I would be adding a set of vowels with macrons I shall try to add Y macron and y macron as well and they need to be added specially. However, all characters for Galileo Lettering are currently on a grid of 256 font units! Yet Galileo Lettering is not usable below 24 point as the lines do not show so maybe the commas below a letter could be better placed on a 128 font unit grid? Or would that spoil the look of the font?

So, here is a hopefully interesting thread of adding characters to fonts so as to help conserve an ancient language and allowing it to be displayed using a range of modern fonts, display fonts as well as ordinary text fonts.

William Overington

2

I have now added some additional characters to each of the five fonts in the Galileo Lettering collection of Unicode-encoded display fonts so that the font now includes all of the characters of the Latvian language.

There is a note in the Galileo Lettering thread of the Gallery forum.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/galileo-lettering-font/834/1

In the event I maintained the 256 font unit grid and am pleased with the result.

Please note that the lowercase letters of the Galileo Lettering font are implemented as small capitals. The accent on a g when the g is an ordinary lowercase g is a special design. Details are in the Unicode document mentioned above.

William

3

Chronicle Text, since version 0.21, has all of the characters needed for Latvian.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/chronicle-text-font/668/1

William

4

Style, since version 0.15, has all of the characters needed for Latvian.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/style-font/828/1

William

5

Artistic Text version 0.22, uploaded to the web early evening 7 September 2005, supports Latvian.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/artistic-text-font/676/1

William

6

Quest text now has the characters for Latvian.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/quest-text-font/671/1

William

7

The following thread offers a public domain Unicode font in a file named Tuffy6.ttf which font includes the characters for Latvian.

http://forum.high-logic.com:9080/t/new-to-someone-at-least-fonts-for-teachers/1089/1

William

8

Some people trying to enter Latvian text into an application which does not have an Insert Symbol facility or a keyboard shortcut facility might find the following pdf which I produced useful.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/typecase_accented_characters_for_Latvian.pdf

One or more or all of the characters of the pdf may be copied onto the clipboard and then pasted into the application and then formatted using a font which contains glyphs for the accented characters needed for Latvian.

Indeed, copying and pasting all of the characters and trying to format them in a particular font may be useful to some readers as a test as to whether the font contains glyphs for the accented characters needed for Latvian.

William Overington

9 September 2008

9

May I draw the attention of readers of this thread to the following documents please?

L2/13-052

L2/13-053

L2/13-037

The documents are all available from the following web page.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L-curdoc.htm

William Overington

17 May 2013

10

I have now posted a suggestion to the Unicode mailing list.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2013-m05/0017.html

Here is the list of posts for May 2013 so that any further posts in the thread in May 2013 may be accessed.

http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2013-m05/index.html

William Overington

17 May 2013

11

There are two further documents now available from that web page.

L2/13-125 includes a paragraph on page 2 about the issues.

L2/13-127 is all about the issues.

William Overington

13 June 2013

12

There is now another document available.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L-curdoc.htm

L2/13-128

William Overington

15 June 2013