American Indian / Native American language fonts

[JosephErb]

[JosephErb]

It still needs some work but you can see the bare bones of some things. We looked at hand writing and tried to get a thinner more balanced look and roy did most of the tech work on this. This is just a sample and not cleaned up but it might help some out there have another thing to reference. It is strange still for most elders to see a font that changed so much compared to the type face we have had for almost two hundred years. but we are trying to make the language work better for the youth and the future.

[JosephErb]

[JosephErb]

here is another sample of a verb book that used a thin font...

[JosephErb]

[John Hudson]

Thanks. Joesph. One of the things I have wondered about is the number of zigzags on Ꮸ and Ᏻ, and I see that you have fewer in your thing font than in the traditional type.

[JosephErb]

IT changes in hand writing and from one font to another...

[JosephErb]

[hrant]

Wow, I never knew Jack Tramiel was Cherokee.

hhp

[Si_Daniels]

You don't know Jack. :-)

[JosephErb]

ᏟᎾᎷᎷᎾᎠᏫᏒᎬ ᏣᎳᎩ jack.

[JosephErb]

:) :Ꭰ ᏑᎠ ;Ꮲ ᏑᏢ cherokee emoticons

people started making them on facebook about six months ago...

[hrant]

I'm just seeing Unicode boxes. :-(
But I can imagine how cool they must be!

BTW, here's an Armenian one! :Ճ
Although since it's Armenian :¬Ճ would be more anatomically correct!

hhp

[TylerEldredge]

Hrant, that was hilarious! Haha!

I'd be interested to see some samples of handwriting in Cherokee. I've thought about playing with a script font for Cherokee, but, in all honesty, I have no idea what the glyphs would look like.

And aside from Cherokee, what about expanding fonts to include the diacritics regularly used in Lakota? Letters like ŋ or ȟ have very poor support, I've seen books restricted to using TNR because it was the only font that had enough character support. No one should be forced to use TNR, heavens.

[Khaled Hosny]

Looking for fonts covering Cherokee (since I was seeing Unicode boxes here), I found these Free fonts (GPL v3) and the sans font is particularly interesting...

[JosephErb]

here i a Cherokee font to fix those boxes

http://www.languagegeek.com/font/fontdownload.html#Cherokee

[charles_e]

Tyler, I've set Lakota, both using the Ella Doria orthography and the Buchtel orthography. In the days of the Linotron 202 -- before 1992 or so -- you really were limited to Times. Of course, that was a better Times.

Now, with Adobe fonts anyway, anyone can pretty easily modify a font to include all the Lakota characters. I've done this for a couple, including Minion. The problem is you cannot *distribute* those fonts -- but you can certainly make them up for your own use.

[hrant]

Well, for Adobe fonts for one you can distribute them to
people who [tell you that they] own a license to the original.

hhp

[charles_e]

Hrant:

Really? from the Adobe FAQ site, http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/antipiracy/ff_faq.html

For example, you can use Macromedia Fontographer or Pyrus FontLab to customize an Adobe Font for individual usage, but you are not permitted to distribute, sell, or give away, the derivative work, and the derivative work counts as one of the permitted number of uses."

and

A consultant may solicit their services to companies who have legitimately licensed copies of Adobe font software. The work product of the consultant must remain with the company. The consultant cannot (i) take or keep a copy of the company’s original, localized, or customized version of the font software, or (ii) distribute any original, localized or customized versions of the font software.

[hrant]

Basically parties that own licenses of a given Adobe font can give each other mods.

When I did a mod to Garamond Premier Pro (I was commissioned to add 10 new
compound letters, each in UC and lc, for setting transliterated Sanskrit) the client
owned a license, and I had a license thanks to owning InDesign* so it was fine.

* Which I won in a contest to find a
name for Thomas Phinney's Adobe blog. :-)

hhp

[charles_e]

What can I say but repeat that isn't what the FAQ seems to say, or what I understood Christopher Slye to say in an email exchange earlier this year. I could be wrong. It would be nice if somebody from Adobe would step in and clarify this. The EULAs-as-amended-by FAQs are a mess. And as Tyler's post shows, it matters.

[Christopher Slye]

Well, for Adobe fonts for one you can distribute them to people who [tell you that they] own a license to the original.

Nope. This part of the FAQ is fairly straightforward:

... you can use the converted software for your own customary and internal business use, but you may not redistribute, resell, or transfer this converted or modified font software to anyone beyond the scope of your license for the original font software.

[hrant]

Hmmm, well OK, sorry.
The thing is I do remember getting a sort of quasi-official "go ahead"
before doing the Garamond Premier Pro job. I'm pretty sure of that since
I didn't actually try to decrypt the EULA - I relied on that "go ahead".

Now, about that "internal":
Would it be OK if I were an employee of the client?
What's the difference between an employee and a consultant?
This is all quite gray isn't it?

hhp

[DavidL]

I think I recall the case Hrant mentions, and I'm probably the person who gave him the go-ahead. But I see the context got a bit scrambled.

It's fine for the party who's licensed the font to commission someone else to make the modifications. That person should have a legitimate copy of the font as well. And that's the situation Hrant was in. But those modifications should be restricted to the original licensee, not distributed to others.

Is that a bit clearer?
- thanks,
David L

[hrant]

Thanks David - I feel better now!

There's still a patch of medium gray that we might hopefully
move closer to white or black: what's the difference between
the party who requested the modification versus any other
party who has a legit copy of that same font?

hhp