Letter combination?

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1

Hello,

I want to make a font for Old Turkic Runes. But I want it so that when I type, for example, “A” and “T” it will combine/translate into one character/glyph. Old Turkic letters are similar to Katakana/Hiragana, but are the reverse. For example, “at”,“et”,“it”, etc… how can I solve this problem thank you!

2

I am no expert on this topic, but I think you need to add a required ligature feature.

Do you already have FontCreator, and if so which version do you have? If you do I will move this to the FontCreator support forum.

3

Font Creator 9.0 Professional Edition

4

Use the OpenType Designer to add features.

  1. Add a script and language if it doesn’t already have one (using the green [+] button
  2. Add feature to the script, from the Known features, select “Required ligature”
  3. Add a ligature substitution lookup for the feature
  4. Add glyph substitutions to the lookup table, e.g. Input a t output at_lig (depends on having the right glyphs in the font already).

I don’t have the Turkic glyphs in my fonts, so for demonstration purposes I have added a glyph substitution to the lookup table for a + e > æ like this:
Required Ligature.png

5

Interesting language. I had never heard of it before, so thanks!

In a brief poke around the web I understand that Windows 8 and above have added the characters into the Segoe UI font. There are unicode code points for the language since 2009. If I were tasked for this, I think that without modifying the referenced font, I would see if there were included OT scripts and if so, which features are used and how they are written.

Mike

6

I had never heard of it before, either, so thanks from me, too!

It’s actually Segoe UI Symbol that has the added characters. Here’s a screenshot from FC9.0 on Windows 8.1:
Segoe-UI-Symbol_Old-Turkic.png

7

Once you create your Old Turkic font, you also have the problem of how to type it.

  • If you create the glyphs in the Latin Basic character mappings A-z etc., there is no need for a special keyboard, and any ligatures don’t need to be mapped, or they can be in the Private Use Area. However, if someone uses your font, they cannot then change the text to use another font with Turkic glyphs as it will change to Latin text.
  • If you want to create a professional font with correct Unicode mappings as in Segoe UI Symbol then you need to find a way to type with the font.
8

Thank you so much! I am currently trying everything you taught me! There are variants of the OT out there, but they are done somewhat incorrectly. What I intended to do was very similar to how katakana/hiragana is typed out, except vowels precede consonants in Old Turkic. And no problem! Its a very interesting script! A shame it was abandoned by Turks years ago! It could have become as sophisticated as the Chinese script!