Hello
I’m working on designing Arabic fonts and I want my font to support specific languages. Languages contain a lot of glyphs, and you don’t really need to add them all. There must be a way to determine the minimum required.
For example, when I needed to know what I needed to make my font support French, my friend Bhikkhu Pesala helped me.
So what if I want to add Spanish?
Now I need to know what I need to make my font support Kurdish?
And when you search the internet, you get different results.
It doesn’t make sense for a designer to be familiar with all languages
or to design all the glyphs for a specific language.
They don’t need to be designed for that language only.
It would be better if FontCreator provided ready-made templates,
for example, English only, another for English + French, another for Spanish, another for Arabic only, another for Arabic + Persian, and so on.
With my best regards and appreciation
It can be easily added as an (.xml) file.
Yes, you are right. Things can be improved, but there are over 7000 languages spoken in the world today.
We would prefer to aim at some custom sets, like we already have for Eastern Europe.
Also be aware it is not just a matter of codepoints, as for several scripts like Arabic, the OpenType layout features are just as important.
I remember that many years ago, I created the transform scripts for Vietnamese, WGL4, and Eastern European because I needed them.
You can create and save your own XML scripts using the glyph transformer, and run them to add the glyphs required for any language.
Thank you. The problem is a lack of knowledge.
For example, to write Arabic correctly, I only need 167 glyphs.
But there are other languages written in Arabic letters, so the number of glyphs in Arabic reaches 1,055.
I really don’t need to work on all of them.
The same applies to Latin.
Is there a specialized website to learn about each language and its specific codes?
This is a good starting point:
Hyperglot: a database and tools for detecting language support in fonts
