I have a font that I’m wanting to make, that the glyphs are corresponding to IPA sets in terms of input. I’m looking for help to see if what I want to do is even possible.
Each character “space” is actually two overlaid on top over each other. Either a ‘consonant’ with a ‘vowel’, or the other way around. If there’s a vowel first, however, there is a diacritic mark added below the vowel to denote it comes first. I’m confused as to how to do this part. I’m also confused as to how to keep this pairing strictly to that. Say, with the word “and”, it would be (vowel + consonant w/ diacritic) (an + d), but with “sand” it would be (consonant + vowel, consonant + consonant) (sa + n + d). Consonants never overlap, and vowels never overlap.
Also, is there any (possibly easy) way to look forward and backwards in a set to change the glyph possibly see two or three characters ahead to determine what a glyph should change to? I’ve tried using the contextual alternatives, but it seems that only goes one back and in front, and as I previously stated, I’m basing this on IPA sets, so almost everything is one or two characters in themselves, maybe three in a rare case. Some glyphs might be represented by five or six sets of characters. One glyph as it is can be represented by eɪ, ɜr, ər, əˌr, or ə depending.
Stress marks ˈ and ˌ in front of consonants, and for the most part ː behind vowels, would be ignored and produce the glyph like it wasn’t there, however, it might change a vowel to a diacritic version according to the previous placement. So, for example, ˈfeɪθfəl (faithful) would produce f + eɪ θ +f ə + l
Is all of this even possible, or am I chasing a pipe dream? I’m unaware of how to use scripts, I’m lost when it comes to those. If someone could help enough for me to understand, maybe I can build off of that for the rest. Sorry if this is asking quite a lot, I know it sounds complicated, but it’s mostly figuring out how to keep the structure confined to pairs of glyphs, and the contextual diacritics.
