Macintosh Live Type underlined vowels

[bobby_watts]

Hi,

We have been researching this for a month and have no answers, anywhere. We use Macintosh and are making Karaoke videos to teach language to tribal people who have never had their language in writing.

We want underlined vowels a, e, i, o and u both in small leters and capitals. We work with the SIL fonts and they cannot be seen in Live Type or Final Cut Pro on the Macintosh. What does it take to undeline a vowel in these programs? Someone must have done this.

Our techs, font writers and programmers can't seem to find a solution. ANyone out there know the answer?

bobby

[William]

I do not use a Macintosh so the following may not be of any use.

I am simply saying what I would do if I wanted to produce print outs or displays using Windows and was trying to solve the problem.

Suppose that I had first checked and found that I did not need to use any of the characters a circumflex, e circumflex, i circumflex, o circumflex and u circumflex in the output.

I would then make a special version of the font and in the glyph positions for a circumflex, e circumflex, i circumflex, o circumflex and u circumflex I would produce glyphs of a underlined, e underlined, i underlined, o underlined and u underlined. Similarly for the capitals. It need not be circumflex that is used, I just steered away from acute in case café is needed and circumflex is fairly clear in character map displays. I do not know if the Macintosh has all ten circumflex accented vowels available.

Then, when preparing the text I would use the special version of the font and use what the program would think of as the circumflex version of the vowel whenever I wanted an underlined vowel displayed.

If this is used for print, then fine. If it is used for screen viewing on a computer then probably fine, only poor if an end user needs to edit the text. If used for teaching people to write then probably awful.

Hopefully this solution or some adaption of it will be suitable to produce your videos.

William Overington

[William]

I have now produced an experimental version of my 10000 font named 10000 Experimental which has the glyphs for A circumflex, E circumflex, I circumflex, O circumflex, U circumflex, a circumflex, e circumflex, i circumflex, o circumflex and u circumflex each having a version of the vowel with an underline rather than a circumflex accent.

The design of the lettering of the font may well mean that it would not be the right design of lettering to use for the final videos, however as I am able to adapt my own fonts without any concerns over copyright implications, I have produced this font in case you might like to try it out in some tests as a concept testing excercise so as to determine whether the technique suggested in my earlier post in this thread could produce what you want.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/10000EXP.TTF

William