I have received the following comments on my release of
Mike Hebrew v1.04
I downloaded it, added the font to my Word (Microsoft
Word 2002), and it WOULDN"T WORK (for me, that is).I did the same:
I do not know enough about fonts, and I haven’t explored Mike’s font
enough yet, but it seems that Word does not recognise it as a
non-English-supporting font, possibly despite the glyph mappings.
Alas I don’t have Word so I can’t investigate this problem.
Could any helpfull soul try this?
You need to select Code Page Range “Latin 1 (1252)”. The Calculate button should do the trick in Font Creator version 5.
I’m struggling a bit with the design of a Greek font. This is what I figured.
a) I would attempt to imitate some of SPIonic in the overstrike keys, but not all of them
b) no numbers, and instead ligatures and abbreviations in their place
c) I see little separate use of bold (frankly even italic and italic bold) in at least the centuries older typography, so I place variations on letter forms in bold. I wonder if anyone thinks that unwise, in this context?
d) I hope to incorporate the standard Greek and extended Greek in Unicode as well - all pre-composed letters/marks.
But Hebrew has so many of these marks, that I wonder how you designed the font. Did you use an overstrike, SPIonic, sort of thing, or that with Unicode, in addition? As in the Unicode specification complete?
Sevry7,
The font ought to be quite independent of the keyboard. In reality, a font
may have to work with proprietory mappings. My producing a purely
Unicode font is a way of hopefully freeing myself from keyboard worries.
By ‘overstrike’ I presume you mean that the glyph has a small or
zero width from the point of view of cursor advance. In my Hebrew
font the nikud (vowels) and the cantillation marks are all associated
with a zero or small cursor advance. I position them in such a way
that they will be displayed above or below the Hebrew letter which
they modify.
These matters are mostly for religious texts. Modern Hebrew is
(miraculously) read by Israelis without using such marks. Whole books
may be printed in Israel with hardly any latin so I’m looking at
various texts to see what special charcters are used e.g. brackets,
numbers and so on,
Will your font be used for modern greek?
No, sadly, the early typeset Greek of the Renaissance. That borrowed a HOST of abbreviations and ligatures, not to mention various odd, archaic letter forms, from manuscripts prior to that - mostly used to save space and parchment I would guess. It seems many dropped out of use as typesetting continued. But these works are roughly of the 15-17th century period. There is no current Greek font that can do the job. But organizing it is something I wrestle with. I have a portion of the SPIonic ‘overstrikes’, the non-advance marks, using that keyboard layout. I have a number of pre-composed and abbreviations available in the lower 255. And I will also include the standard composite on the Unicode pages, which I think is the Latin, Greek, and Extended Greek. But then what to do about the ligatures and abbreviations? Stick them on the cyrillic page? I don’t know. For now, the twenty or so most common are at the numeric positions. Greek used letters for numbers. But as the letters already are available, I didn’t see the need to duplicate them for the base 10 digits. So 10 abbreviations and ligatures are available 0-9. And ten more are available 0-9 in bold. Since I use only italic, anyway, but in a Regular font, I could continue overloading in the Latin page into both italic and bold italic so that the user need never change font, only bold or italic combination. I don’t know if that will work out. I’ll have to post these, soon, and take whatever constructive criticism comes my way.