Unicode metrical scanning characters

[Connie Bobroff]

Roozbeh or others,

The recent prosody (vazn) discussion has inspired me to think about Unicode scansion characters after many years.

It is really not nice to be using symbols like

˘ˉˉˉ |  ˉˉ˘ 

when the proper ones were encoded long ago.

Can you please remind me where the list is (which block in the Unicode tables) and hopefully if there is a user-friendly list with available fonts in html, not PDF format?

As I recall, at least one symbol needed for Perso-Arabic poetry was not available.

[Roozbeh Pournader]

Here is the short answer, in developer-friendly fashion (sorry Connie,
don't have the time to do user-friendly, that's your field).

The characters specific to metrical notation are U+23D1 to U+23D9.
The chart is here:
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2300.pdf

The Unicode Standard itself doesn't say much about them except this,
from Unicode 5.2, page 479: "The symbols in the range U+23D1..U+23D9
are a set of spacing symbols
used in the metrical analysis of poetry and lyrics."

There is a very recent proposal for adding more characters for
metrical notation, but to my knowledge, it has *not* been considered
by any of the standards committees yet:

http://std.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n3913.pdf

I do not know which symbol used for Persian or Arabic poetry is still
missing. If you tell me more details, I will try to push for it in the
next UTC meeting which will probably consider the above document.

Roozbeh

> --
> http://groups.google.com/group/persian-computing

[Connie Bobroff]

Thank you for all this information, Roozbeh. It's a great help.

[Connie Bobroff]

Well, these characters are only in a very few fonts:

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/23d1/fontsupport.htm

I cannot use them on a webpage.

Is there some other solution other than begging Behnam to put them in one of his fonts and then making the users download and install the font?

[John Hudson]

Connie wrote:

> Well, these characters are only in a very few fonts:
> http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/23d1/fontsupport.htm
> I cannot use them on a webpage.
> Is there some other solution other than begging Behnam to put them in
> one of his fonts and then making the users download and install the font?

The CSS @font-face tag and a web served font would be the obvious
solution. At the moment, that means serving the font in different
formats for different browsers, but we're working towards a single
compressed delivery format standard, WOFF.

JH

--

Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Gulf Islands, BC ti...@tiro.com

A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the
light of a story. -- Paul Elie

[Connie Bobroff]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 10:30 AM, John Hudson <jo...@tiro.ca> wrote:

 

The CSS @font-face tag and a web served font would be the obvious solution. At the moment, that means serving the font in different formats for different browsers, but we're working towards a single compressed delivery format standard, WOFF.

John,

Ok, the CSS @font-face may be good enough to get the characters visible on a page so as to have a discussion as to what further characters are needed. Thank you for the info.

I'm not familiar with the available fonts but I guess the SIL font will be free:

Cardo 
Code2000 
EversonMono 
EversonMono-Oblique 
LastResort 
LeedsUni 
Unicode BMP Fallback SIL 

[John Hudson]

Connie wrote:

> Ok, the CSS @font-face may be good enough to get the characters visible
> on a page so as to have a discussion as to what further characters are
> needed. Thank you for the info.
> I'm not familiar with the available fonts but I guess the SIL font will
> be free:

I believe SIL have recently produced dedicated webfont versions of at
least some of their fonts. Best check their website.

J.

[Connie Bobroff]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 11:21 AM, John Hudson <jo...@tiro.ca> wrote:

I believe SIL have recently produced dedicated webfont versions of at least some of their fonts. Best check their website.

John,

SIL only has these characters in its "fallback font" (which is a new term for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font )

However, the Cardo font

http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html#DownloadLink

appears to be just what is needed although it is a large font intended for print publishing.

The designer also appears to be interested in adding new characters and improving the font which is nice.

Can you please point me to a tutorial on how to implement this font using CSS @font-face method? Or does the font itself need to first be modified and turned into a web font?

Thank you.

 

[John Hudson]

Connie wrote:

> Can you please point me to a tutorial on how to implement this font
> using CSS @font-face method? Or does the font itself need to first be
> modified and turned into a web font?

I'm not a web developer, so there are probably people (on this list?)
better able to give advice. My role in all this is on the font side and
as part of the W3C web fonts working group defining the WOFF format
standard.

Using the @font-face syntax in your CSS is pretty simple: you define a
font family by name and then point to a source. See, for examples,
http://www.devlounge.net/design/five-tips-for-using-font-face

You need to be aware that differenr browsers currently require different
delivery formats for web fonts. Some browsers support 'raw' TTF/OTF font
file linking; Internet Explorer (versions 6-8) does not but instead uses
the EOT format; the new betas of IE9 and Firefox support WOFF and to my
knowledge all the major browser vendors are busy implementing WOFF
support. If you want your content to display correctly on as many
browsers as possible, you need to serve multiple file formats.

You might also want to check out the Google font directory, which
includes a growing number of free fonts that can be linked to directly
from Google servers. I believe the idea of the Google font API is that
they look after serving the different formats.
http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/
This includes Cardo.

The other issue you will end up contenting with is that a lot of fonts
simply do not perform well at small sizes and low resolutions,
especially not on older OS versions including the still prevalant
Windows XP. Also, fonts are now subject to a wide range of different
rendering environments, and just because something is readable on your
system does not mean it will be on every user's.

JH

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On 10/12/10 03:38, Connie Bobroff wrote:

> However, the Cardo font
> _http://scholarsfonts.net/cardofnt.html#DownloadLink_
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallback_font>

> appears to be just what is needed although it is a large font intended
> for print publishing.
> The designer also appears to be interested in adding new characters and
> improving the font which is nice.
> Can you please point me to a tutorial on how to implement this font
> using CSS @font-face method? Or does the font itself need to first be
> modified and turned into a web font?
> Thank you.

Connie, you can do it all by yourself! Start with Cardo or any other fonts
that has a permissible license, then download and install FontForge, open the
font, select and cut the characters you don't need, and Generate new fonts.
Then take your new font, go to http://www.font2web.com/, upload it there,
download the zip file and use!

behdad

[Connie Bobroff]

John and Behdad,

 

Thank you so much for the help. It will really take the entire global village to get anywhere with this.

Note that this link:

http://code.google.com/webfonts

crashes Ubuntu/Firefox (both latest updates), otherwise the Google fonts are really exciting and I'm trying to implement that on a test page. Please be patient!

 

Unfortunately, the Cardo font is very faint and hard to see on a webpage.

 

I also discovered the Symbola font with the 'Miscellaneous Technical' block (thanks  Behnam Mac!) which Firefox will display very nicely on a web page even if you don't have the font installed.

 

I am going to have a lot of suggestions for the font makers. For one thing, these characters are positioned at the top of a cell as if they are to be combined with some other character underneath. They need to be in the middle and bigger and bolder so they can stand alone and be visible.

 

Back to you later. Thanks again!