Interest in High-Logic's Support for going Beyond Unicode

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Dexetrue
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Joined: Thu May 12, 2016 7:42 am

Interest in High-Logic's Support for going Beyond Unicode

Post by Dexetrue »

I have an Interest in cataloguing the full range of what I call Litmarks: the range of characters used in both print & handwriting throughout time. What do you know that could help me do this?

• http://www.unicode.org/charts/ is actually the basis for my Inquiry. I am looking for a database that can keep track of the various languages, the languages' endonyms (how each language is referred to by those that converse in it, as well the native names for each of its Litmarks) and have the various glyphs all differentiated properly, so there would be several Z's (not just the regular one that sorts after Y, but including one that sorts after G the way Latin did originally, and one between S and T for the Estonian one, etc.

In older English, & was an uppercase letter that had a lower-case variant which is still current in most people's handwriting.

Also, there needs to be a Lithuanian lowercase i, which keeps the dot automatically when adding diacritics, and a Turkish lowercase i, which pairs automatically with İ, and a Turkish I which pairs automatically with ı. Also there needs to be two different ŋ's, because the Sámi capital looks different from the African one.

Again, when we use the Han scripts, there needs to be disunification because many characters look different from even between Mandarin, Japanese, and Cantonese, and the various other languages need to be equally represented.

Then there are the various errors in kerning such as the two-letter "rn" combo looking like the single-letter "m" in many fonts, and minus-signs etc., that are at the wrong height. I like the idea that Google has with their Noto series, though I note some design flaws there as well. I need to be able to swap some characters from other fonts to take their place. Ideally I'd like to reduce my fonts to about twice what Noto is, all comprehensive fonts, and getting completely rid of the fonts I don't like and having their characters all replaced with ones I do like.
Bhikkhu Pesala
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Re: Interest in High-Logic's Support for going Beyond Unicode

Post by Bhikkhu Pesala »

I have edited your post to add paragraph breaks and to remove the random capitalisation of some words, to make it easier to read. Please forgive me if I inadvertently introduced any errors.

This topic is some way beyond my skill level, but as far as I know, all of the issues can be addressed by FontCreator already. The variants required by different languages can be accessed by adding OpenType scripts for each language, and alternate letter forms like a lowercase & could be addressed by using Stylistic Alternates.

The incorrect height of the minus sign should be fixed if you use the Complete Composites feature to generate the minus sign from the plus sign, then make it simple and delete the vertical bar. That way both glyphs will be the same vertical position and will have the same advance width. (Personally, I base that on the advance width of figure zero, but it is up to the designer to make such decisions).
Minus Sign.png
Minus Sign.png (1.72 KiB) Viewed 3175 times
The incorrect kerning of rn is again a decision that the font designer needs to make.

Copying glyphs from other fonts is not usually permitted, but my fonts do allow this.

The Letters Database may be helpful to you.
My FontsReviews: MainTypeFont CreatorHelpFC15 + MT12.0 @ Win 10 64-bit build 19045.2486
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