Re: Unicode Fonts and Vera (was: Encoding problem with Azerbaijani translations of ISO-3166 names)

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 04:48:55PM +0200, Metin Amiroff wrote:

> and monospace TTFs too. We had a conversation
> about the unicode console fonts with Pablo Saratxaga
> in the past and it came to the result that we need a good
> console font creator for that job, as current unicode
> console fonts we are using are his modifications made by hand.

Erh, no, what I said was about fonts used in X11;
there was then (and still is, but less) a lack of good fonts for X11,
so I added some glyphs to bitmap fonts; which is ugly, vectorial fonts
are much much better, but real font-making knowledge is needed to have
something good.

As for font coverage, a font covering all scripts isn't necessarly a
good idea; however what should be the case imho is that a font covering
latin script includes the needed glyphs for all languages using latin
alphabet; and a font with cyrillic should include all needed cyrillic
glyphs and not only basic ones, etc.

> Of course. Actually there is very little to add to fonts to support
> Azerbaijani. A small 'Schwa' letter which is a 180 degrees rotated
> small 'e' and its capital letter with the same aspects.

It isn't exactly a rotated "e"; it seems to me that the horizontal bar
of the "ə" is always horizontal, even when the horizontal bar of the "e"
is in fact oblique in some fonts; or am I wrong?

Note also that I had seen fonts which include the lowercase schwa (used
also as an IPA symbol) but not the uppercase.

> I also want other translators here to respond with their problems
> about Vera fonts family

They lack a lot of glyphs: polish, romanian, esperanto, vietnamese,
maltese, lithuanian, latvian, hungarian, welsh, azeri are some of
the not covered languages (or maybe some of the accented chars can be
composed on the fly with opentype method? still, with the existing
accents in the font, it will suffice only for romanian and welsh)
Most of the missing glyphs could easily be added, as glyphs with the
same diacritics are already present.
The only real new ones are: the schwa, vietnamese ohorn and uhorn.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto]
[min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aŭ latinidaj lingvoj]

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