Greek characters on IPA

[Member cha…]

Peter, I would use FontLab FontStudio. I've been using FontLab a long time, including the period when we used "Buffalo TeX" (our implementation of the old Y&Y TeX).

But that was 8-bit fonts. Now we use InDesign. It may be that another font editing program would better meet your needs if you plan on sticking with a 16-bit version of TeX. Are you going to have to rewrite all the OT features for the TeX you use? Is the fact that FontLab will compile the existing features of Garamond Premier Pro of interest to you? Those sorts of questions.

The program is not cheap; there may be a student discount.

The learning curve is not quick, but it is worth it.

If you cannot draw -- not in the sense that Matthew Carter meant when he said "I can't draw", but in my sense, where I *really* can't draw, you can still do work. Basically, as complicated as I get is to cut apart existing pieces & hook them up again. If the curves need a little work, I can do that. I never start from scratch; I don't have the skill.

This runs counter to most of the people who hang out on Typophile, they can all draw, can all create glyphs from scratch. But with patience, you can fiddle things into shape.

Charles Ellertson

Edit: I see the subject of feature files has come up.

FontLab will export and export feature files. I use an old text editor to write them, Vedit. A better, modern program would be EditPad Pro. Much better than writing the features in FL, but that too can be done.

[Member Ros…]

‘My only complaint is that the small Latin letter upsilon, ʊ, looks too literally like a small upside-down capital omega at the moment[...]Any idea when it will be ready?’

If you're looking at the specimen on the website, its nearly two months out of date—yes, I did change the design of ‘ʊ’. I hope to have the regular done soon, but can't give an exact date as its being done on my own time and dime.

‘your small-cap ƛ. Who did you design this for? Are there any languages that use the symbol in their practical orthographies?’

I designed it for whoever uses the barred lambda. My general principal was/is to provide users with full casing support (uppercase, lowercase, and smallcaps), insofar as possible and practical, despite the fact many languages have not traditionally had that option. It may be the lack of full casing for some characters has become a defacto standard or at least the expectation—ie. official orthographies may not specify casing rules, but this doesn't preclude casing being used for titling, emphasis etc.. I simply want to present users the same typographic sophistication available to other (majority) languages—whether or not anyone will use them, I don't know yet, but at least the option is there.

[Member Joh…]

Peter: John, you are correct to point out the need to distinguish the single- and double-story as in Italic IPA, and that g should always appear in a single-story variant. However, I’m not sure I know any system where your two f glyphs are contrastive...

Yes, that needs a bit more explanation. The descending hook is a generative form in IPA (palatal); so even though the hooked-descender f is not used within IPA, I think descending hooks within that system should not be treated as stylistic elements as in typical italic typefaces.

The hooked-descender f is used extensively in African alphabets (to indicate a voiceless bilabial fricative), and needs to be distinguished in form from the regular f character. In an italic font, this means that the regular f needs a localised form, either non-descending or with a straight descender.

[Member Joh…]

I find the IPA chi by far the most difficult of the special forms to design. I think it needs to retain some chi-ness, probably through retention of the Greek stroke contrast: otherwise it looks too static.

I like Ross' solution for the Huronia IPA.

[Member Pet…]

John: The descending hook is a generative form in IPA (palatal); so even though the hooked-descender f is not used within IPA, I think descending hooks within that system should not be treated as stylistic elements as in typical italic typefaces.

Okay, I see where you might have gotten that idea, but the "featural" elements of the IPA shouldn't be treated as the featural elements of a system like Hangul. Each glyph is individually defined. While there are a few recurring elements that seem to have their own meaning (like the right hooked descender that derives all the retroflex consonants from the alveolars), this shouldn't be extended to the j-tail of the palatals. For one thing, there are palatals that don't have it (c, ç and ʎ), but more importantly, the idea of /f/ with palatal coarticulation is nonsensical. An /f/ with a palatal secondary articulation would be transcribed as /fʲ/. No one could ever see the italic f and confuse it for anything (except maybe ʃ or ʄ, but there will always be similar-looking characters in a system as finicky as the IPA). Anyway, italic f in IPA should definitely have the same form as the corresponding text font.

Ewe is another story, and I thank you for pointing it out to me. Sounds like a good job for that Sabon-style italic f.

I think it needs to retain some chi-ness, probably through retention of the Greek stroke contrast: otherwise it looks too static.

Obviously you have precedent on your side with that position; but if nothing else in the system has Greek stress, I just think the chi ends up looking terribly lost.

[Member gui…]

Here are my greek and IPA letters and also a sample text with them. Not 100% finished but getting there. Although I admit I just did it today, the chi actually looks pretty good when I've set a word or two and also in a larger body of transcription. It also makes for some nice diacritic positioning.

Lower quality for the sample text but it's to see how it all works together:

The transcription is from a sample phonetics exam with a few random letters replaced by the latinized greek letters to give them context. If anyone has some extremely close transcriptions of languages with a higher phonetic inventory than Spanish and could pass them along for testing I'd be most appreciative.

[Member And…]

I was out for some other business, so my reply comes a bit late.

Thanks to Peter Farago very much for his most valuable font survey.
I allow myself to add an Andron-sample of the letters in question for comparison and invite you to comment:

These are all standard glyphs of the font, no variants (of which the fonts have many, too). You’ll note a conflict in Italics with the v and the upsilon, a case similar to the IPA-a-problem described by John Hudson. If I change the Italic v to make it different from the upsilon, this becomes an issue for mathematics, where a distinction between ital. v and ital. nu is required … a mess.

And this is how text set in Greek or Phonetics only look like in Andron Mega:
(note, the very same glyphs as shown above)

[Member And…]

1. Of the Greek characters without IPA-specific codepoints, beta is by far the most problematic. Really think hard about offering a latinized glyph variant.
I agree. However, if a proper blending of Latin and Greek is seen as a desirable option for fonts, it would not be neccessary.

2. If you make sure that your theta stands upright and that your Greek and Latin have generally similar weight and ductus, you might be able to get away with one glyph for both systems.
This shall be the target.

3. I consider chi to be an unsolved problem for the IPA. It seems to me that there must be a way of unifying its stroke weight and serifs with the Latin without making it and the letter x hopelessly ambiguous. Could a chi-like glyph based on the letter y (with serifed upper terminals and a ball terminal on the descender) be successful? Maybe a Q-like terminal on the downward diagonal? Previous efforts suggest not satisfaction but surrender; this calls for further experimentation.
See my last posting for that.

Allow me one last remark adressed to all Do-it-yourself-fontists: D O N ’T do it – unless you’re a trained type designer. The samples shown above of all these free fonts may illustrate what I mean.

[Member cha…]

Allow me one last remark adressed to all Do-it-yourself-fontists: D O N ’T do it – unless you’re a trained type designer.

One might as well say to all the do-it-yourself type designers: D O N ' T do it -- unless you are a trained compositor with strong editorial skills.

[Member And…]

further discussion: https://typography.guru/forums/topic/68725-forwarding