New Font for Vietnamese, Pali, and Sanskrit

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Verajja is my latest effort to produce a high quality Unicode font with comprehensive coverage of Latin character sets. It is derived from Bitstream Vera, a font released under the Gnome Project with a generous license agreement. Verajja is a Pali word meaning “a variety of kingdoms or provinces,” so I hope this font will live up to its name and be useful to many nationalities and linguists.

For the first time, with this font, I used the Private Use Area for stacking diacritics, which made composing composites both quicker, and more consistent. Although it took me several days to edit the Regular typestyle because I had to edit the CompositeData.xml file too, the other styles were much quicker to do. I completed the last one — the Bold Italic typestyle — this afternoon in about four hours, with much of the work being automated.

Character Map

[Yehuda]

Nice.

But the Israeli currency symbol (Unicode $20AA) is backwards: it should be flipped so the part with the opening on the top is on the right. It is based on the two letters that form the Hebrew abbreviation for "new shekel" (or "new sheqel"), so the order of the two parts is meaningful. (I also don't like the rounded style, which I guess is based on the Unicode charts. But the order of the two pieces is not a question of taste, but of correct vs. incorrect.)

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Thanks for the feedback. Easily fixed. I squared off the corners too.

[William]

I have been having a look at the Verajja:Version 1.10 font.

I tried it in Word 97 on a Windows 98 machine and tried Insert | Symbol to have a look at what selection of characters is present in the font.

I was testing at 24 point. Word 97 was in Normal view at 100%.

I looked for the Esperanto accents, namely C circumflex, G circumflex, H circumflex, J circumflex, S circumflex, U breve and their lowercase equivalents.

In the dialogue panel of Word 97, except for h circumflex the lowercase versions looked fine yet all of the capitals seemed wrong: except for U breve the accent was missing entirely.

I tried the following string of 12 accented characters at 24 point.

ĈĉĜĝĤĥĴĵŜŝŬŭ

Yet when I reformatted at 36 point, except for U breve all of the accents worked well.

I then tried some tests and found that the changeover point is between a 31 point and a 32 point size!

I have not produced a font using composite glyphs myself and so do not fully understand what is happening. Hopefully this will be an opportunity for me to learn more about it.

William Overington

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Thanks William. I see the same problem in Wordpad.

This seems to be caused by scaling of composite glyph members. All uppercase grave, acute, breve, circumflex, caron accents are scalled vertically by 70% but if you look at Éé at larger point sizes you will see that the accents are identical. They should not be. The uppercase accent should be flatter. Fractions like ¼ also use glyph member scaling, and exhibit some problems.

Not sure what the reason is. I need some expert help on this.
I've removed the font from my website for the time being.

[Erwin Denissen]

When a Composite Glyph uses hinted glyphs, they can affect the Composite Glyph when such a Composite Glyph Member is scaled. I thought version 5 did remove hinting data of all scaled composite glyph members as soon as the Composite Glyph Properties are modified. I’ll add this issue to the bug list.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Thanks for that. I removed the hinting from each of the accents that were scaled, and that seems to have solved the problem. I will convert the fractions, superscripts, and subscripts to simple glyphs, then use the glyph transformer to make them bolder. That should solve any possible problem with dropout due to lack of hinting.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

I've upload just the regular and italic typestyles of Verajja to my webspace.

• I removed hinting from accents that were scaled glyph members
• I made fractions, super and subscripts into simple glyphs
• I used the glyph transformation wizard to make them bolder.

Edit: Updated with all four typestyles.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Updated again with a few more symbols from the latest Unicode 4.1.0 standard. The character set is not yet complete.

Fractions are now composed only with superscripts. CompositeData.xml has also been updated to use this method.

[Dave Crosby]

Excellent work AND A remarkable collection of symbols!

Many thanks!