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Unicode Fonts

From:Jonathan Lipps <jon832@...>
Date:Monday, March 18, 2002, 7:11
Another question:

I've designed a non-latin script for my conlang, Enaselvai. I also have all
the characters in digitized format.  I wanted to make a font, so that I
could type/print out things in Enaselvai.  So, I got the only shareware font
program I found--the font creator program.

Now, the thing about the Enaselvai script is, that every vowel acts like an
accent in latin scripts.  So, for instance, if I were to write "legaveth", I
would write LGVTh, and the 'e' would go over the L, the 'a' would go over
the G, and the next 'e' would go over the V.

There are 5 individual vowels, and any one vowel can combine to form a vowel
group with any other vowel besides itself. This makes for 20 extra
vowel-group symbols, so there's a total of 25 glyphs that go on top of
consonants.  To complicate things, any of these 25 can appear as a consonant
glyph (i.e., not raised to the ascender), if it is the first character in
the word.

There are 15 consonants. Any of these can take as an accent-like symbol any
of the 25 vowel glyphs.  This makes for a total 375 consonant+vowel-group
glyphs.  Each consonant, like each vowel/vowel-group, can appear without an
accent-like vowel.  So, 375 + 15 + 25 = 415 possible characters in
Enaselvai.

As you might imagine, I'm having trouble getting this into a font.  I did
spend some time a while back, however, and actually put every single
possible character into a WGW4 font using Font Creator Program. This took
some time! So you can understand my dismay when, after installing the .ttf
file, when I use the font in Word, the font is simply regular latin
characters! Even though these characters appear nowhere in the .ttf file.

I figured this had something to do with the unicode mapping of the font, and
so I spent a good many hours researching Unicode on the net, and trying to
figure out how I might use the rather poor interface of the FCP to get my
font working.  Alas, I never did.

Has anyone else tried anything like this and gotten it to succeed? Is it
just because I'm using a program that's not capable of doing what I want? Or
is there something I can do to get this off the ground? I'm very set on
getting this to work somehow, so if anyone's got any suggestions, please
share!

Also, I'll be uploading a website about Enaselvai shortly, and I hope that
some of you will find it interesting!

Keep up the conlanging,
Jonathan

Replies

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>