Useless combinations and glyphs

[Pathum Egodawatta]

Hi All,

In Sinhala and many scripts, there are some Consonant + Matra combinations that are in use. 

Do we design these glyphs and do open type as well or not do these at all? Rakar forms alone will add upto 60-70 extra glyphs.  

Whats the standard on this? Google Fonts is there a policy? :)

Cheers,

Pathum

This might have already discussed, but I couldn't find on this forum. And there is the option of doing 

[Pathum Egodawatta]

Hi again,

I left the end hanging.. I was goignt to write about this ---

While discussing this with Pushpanada Ekanayake, a type designer we spoke of doing a font that would enforce correct spellings only. Sinhala as some simple rules about letter combinations and spellings that would make it fairly easy to write the features.'

Cheers,

Thanks

[Thomas Phinney]

Back when I was at Adobe, we considered some things like this. We came to the conclusion that features that encourage hood typography by default are good, but that it is unwise to make bad typography too difficult.

For example, what happens when somebody wants to use your font while explaining that certain combinations do not occur in Sinhala or Tamil?

Also, what about transliteration of foreign names and words?

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[Dave Crossland]

With a libre font, you can fork it and have 2 versions :) 

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Cheers
Dave

[Dave Crossland]

On 24 June 2015 at 09:32, Pathum Egodawatta <path...@gmail.com> wrote:

Google Fonts is there a policy? :)

I believe that there is a place for 'cat on the keyboard' fonts, which will faithfully render any nonsense text that can be physically typed. I think that place is system fonts like Noto. 

I don't believe that it is important for your fonts to support every combination like that though; it bloats the filesize and wastes your time, which is better spent on making a wider variety of type designs for real world users. 

However, there is a caveat to this, which is that increasingly non-latin scripts must deal with foreign (English) words for which they were not designed/evolved to handle, and which involve these 'crazy' combinations. 

I don't believe anyone anywhere has any data on this. Good luck! :p

[Pathum Egodawatta]

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 9:24:28 PM UTC+5:30, Dave Crossland wrote:

On 24 June 2015 at 09:32, Pathum Egodawatta <path...@gmail.com> wrote:

Google Fonts is there a policy? :)

I believe that there is a place for 'cat on the keyboard' fonts, which will faithfully render any nonsense text that can be physically typed. I think that place is system fonts like Noto. 

I don't believe that it is important for your fonts to support every combination like that though; it bloats the filesize and wastes your time, which is better spent on making a wider variety of type designs for real world users. 

I agree about the time. When looking at the number of that combinations its more than 80  separate glyphs that will require some careful work.

 

However, there is a caveat to this, which is that increasingly non-latin scripts must deal with foreign (English) words for which they were not designed/evolved to handle, and which involve these 'crazy' combinations. 

I don't believe anyone anywhere has any data on this. Good luck! :p

Well, I know in Sinhala there many of these combinations wont make sense. many Rakar forms wont make any sense / can not pronounce. So I can throw out some right away. And until now English hasn't been a problem I think. The range of Sinhala pronunciation is pretty wide. But I am not in a position to say 'No we can just deal with anything.' Have to check with someone.

[Pathum Egodawatta]

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 7:30:24 PM UTC+5:30, Thomas Phinney wrote:

Back when I was at Adobe, we considered some things like this. We came to the conclusion that features that encourage hood typography by default are good, but that it is unwise to make bad typography too difficult.

 

Sorry thins isn't clear to me :( 

For example, what happens when somebody wants to use your font while explaining that certain combinations do not occur in Sinhala or Tamil?

So I checked on all the system default sinhala fonts, on all platforms,  (Noto, Sangam, Nirmala) these combinations can be rendered. As Dave pointed out I think that is the case for all other scripts too. So this can be solved. 

Also, what about transliteration of foreign names and words?

Yes, so that is actually something I have to look into. But I think without proper data there is no way to be conclusive. But anyway for a native reader a totally 'foreign' looking Sinhala combinations wont make sense. And also many of the extra Rakar forms are not pronounceable. 

An assumption from experience: Since Sinhala has this extensive alphabet to write Sanskrit and Pali too this transliteration problem will occur only in some marginal cases. But still it is a valid problem. 

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015, Pathum Egodawatta <path...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi again,

I left the end hanging.. I was goignt to write about this ---

While discussing this with Pushpanada Ekanayake, a type designer we spoke of doing a font that would enforce correct spellings only. Sinhala as some simple rules about letter combinations and spellings that would make it fairly easy to write the features.'

Cheers,

Thanks

On Wednesday, June 24, 2015 at 7:02:18 PM UTC+5:30, Pathum Egodawatta wrote:

Hi All,

In Sinhala and many scripts, there are some Consonant + Matra combinations that are in use. 

Do we design these glyphs and do open type as well or not do these at all? Rakar forms alone will add upto 60-70 extra glyphs.  

Whats the standard on this? Google Fonts is there a policy? :)

Cheers,

Pathum

This might have already discussed, but I couldn't find on this forum. And there is the option of doing 

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[Dave Crossland]

On 24 June 2015 at 16:19, Pathum Egodawatta <path...@gmail.com> wrote:

But still it is a valid problem. 

But it isn't a problem for a stencil display font.