“Ludicrous” is in the eye of the beholder. Just as an aside, i really do not understand how we can have good development in Adobe Arabic typefaces and yet Adobe don’t seem to have one typeface set that contains the necessary characters for Arabic transliteration, it seems ludicrous. Can Indyfont be used to produce a version/glyph of a letter with a simple dot underneath it? All i need is to do this to the letters: Dd, Hh, Ss, Tt, Zz, and i guess for the bold, italic, bold italic variations.Īnd if so would they be usable in digital/ebooks? Like you said it would require a bit of a learning curve for me, so i think that will become background research whilst i get on with the job at hand. So some of your explanation in the middle there was just over a little my head, but i did get the jist of it. He clearly knows what he is doing, as do you, whereas i am just really at the start of this game. Your link didn’t work for Peter Kahrels’s site, but i found it easy enough. So as much as they “do the job”, they don’t look that great on the page and can be fairly limited, hence my quest. They seem to revolve around some take on Times New Roman, with what seems like not much thought having gone into that. The only problem as i stated before is that style wise what is out that contains all the characters needed isn’t that great. So your idea to just go with what is out there is probably the wisest option. So yes, it will be for print and we will be looking to do digital editions as well. I fully appreciate the effort and your well informed insights have contributed a great deal to my understanding of the issue i am facing. Thank you so much for taking the time out to give such a detailed reply. I hope my href links survive, if not a search engine should quickly find Peter Kahrels’s site. I’d look seriously at what fonts are out there with the characters you need already built in, particularly in the scholarly world-proper Sanskrit romanization also requires many dotted letters. However, a careful Arabic transcription project sounds like lots of dotted characters, and good kerning doesn’t just happen. One fly in the ointment is that you lose automatic kerning when you change fonts unless you can live with ID’s “Optical Kerning” (or set up Kahrel’s kerning script) if Indyfont works for you then you might want to buy the Pro version (note that, useful as it is, it doesn’t attempt to replace a true font editor). In an update to his documentation he points to Jongware’s Indyfont, an amazing-and free-InDesign javascript for making single-character fonts from within InDesign. I see that he renders underdots with the “Spacing Dot Above”, U+02D9, which may be more common in existing fonts but could mislead electronic searching and indexing he re-positions this by means of a character style, allowing one to substitute a “Combining Dot Below” (U+0323) borrowed from a more recent font. Even when font licenses allow modification, actually adding new diacritcs or letter-diacritic combinations takes professional tools whose cost is steep in both dollars and learning curve: simply preserving the kerning when modifying a nice, modern typeface isn’t trivial, though this is fundamental for maintaining typographic quality.īefore attempting to de-compile a complex Opentype font you might want to look into Peter Kahrel’s script for entering diacritics in InDesign. Nice as Adobe’s Garamond Premier Pro is (mine dates from 2005), and although it does offer macron vowels (if that is what you mean by “vowels with lines above them”), it includes neither the dotted letters you need nor the special “Combining Diacritics” Unicode added in the range U+0300–036F. However, if there is a chance your efforts may become available electronically then you should ensure the encoding is correct.įont technology didn’t stand pat with PS Type 1, and Opentype opened a new era of “intelligent,” much more complex fonts. “Correctly” allows a lot of leeway, but even pair kerning is relatively simple and accessible in Postscript Type 1 fonts of the previous century. Are we not supposed to insert links? Anyway, here goes:Īre we talking print? If so then coding of the glyphs doesn’t matter so long as they appear correctly on paper. Here is my real response to this thread, submitted earlier today, now stripped of two hrefs that may have caused the reply to a February thread to be re-dated.
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