What languages use this Glyph?

See Bringhurst page 277 (appendix - sorts & characters)

It is part of the extended Latin A set. I know it is used in West Africa, Ghana I think, and Swahili. I am not sure but perhaps Azerbaijani? There are perhaps other places as well. Hopefully a more scholarly voice than mine will know more.

ChrisL

Thanks David,
My Bringhurst is at home. I will look it up tonight.

ChrisL

formerly known as Lapp -- Sami is a Finno-Ugric language (Sweden, Finland ,Norway )

Thanks David.

ChrisL

you'll hafta scroll a bit:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/fdsspec/uppercase.htm
For Sami the design is based on the N (Garamond Premeire Pro), for Hausa the design resembles the lowercase eng (Gentium).

So there are two different characters but they have the same unicode marker and name?

ChrisL

since you're nice :)

Bringhurst --
eng: A basic letter of the alphabet in Lapp, and in its lowercase form, widley used in lingustic and lexicography. It represents the ng sound in the word wing. (Note the different sounds represented by the same letters in the words wing, Wingate, singlet and singe.) Thought it is ISO character, the eng is missing from most text font.

From the link Paul posted:
" Uppercase Eng
Unicode: U+014a

Design : The preferred design of the uppercase Eng for the Sami language is one based on the uppercase N. The design form that resembles a lowercase n is an equivalent form of the uppercase Eng.
The uppercase and lowercase Eng are also used in the western African language of Hausa. In this African language the preferred design for the uppercase Eng is one that has a rounded top similar to a lowercase n."
ChrisL

Thanks David and Paul.

Now I don't know which one to choose or which language gets more use, sigh. :-) I will just do an alt character for it and hope whoever needs it can access it.

ChrisL

i'm assuming this is an OT font. If so, it's easy enough to implement both (on the font end)

if you have the Sami Eng as the default
in the locl feature put

language HOU exclude_dflt;
sub [Eng eng.smcp] by [Eng.salt eng.smcp2];

you could also make a stylistic set that makes the same substitutions. This makes it easy to implement on the application end too (for InDesign CS2 users) until the locl feature is actually acessible by software apps.

Thanks Paul!
No wonder P22 hired you :-)

ChrisL

> language HOU exclude_dflt;
> sub [Eng eng.smcp] by [Eng.salt eng.smcp2];

If you add this code, remember to put the lines:

languagesystem latn dflt;
languagesystem latn HOU;

in the bottom-right part of the OpenType panel. Make sure to include a respective "languagesystem" clause for all languages that are included in your OpenType Layout features code. If you don't do this, for the Hausa language only the "locl" feature will be available, while other features from your font ("smcp", "liga" etc.) will not at all be available for the language!

Thanks Adam!
You guys are the best.

ChrisL

i'm afraid i grossly oversimplified what needs to be done, chris. To see how to properly implement the language and script tags, follow Adams advice above and check out Adobe's feature files that they have made available to the public to see how to properly write the coding. Thank you Adam, for clearing up my statement above.

No sweat Paul.

ChrisL

Here is my engst ending solution for Froggy:

ChrisL

Chris,

don’t you think that in your "N"-derived Eng, the curl is a bit too thick?

Thanks Adam. You are right. I was at odds with matching the J and compromised too much. I will fix it.

ChrisL

Here is a new shot at the Eng:

ChrisL

Adam Twardoch wrote:
> ... remember to put the lines:
>
> languagesystem latn dflt;
> languagesystem latn HOU;

In his OT Layout Feature File presentation at TypeTech, Christopher Slye pointed this out too -- and his examples had an additional line preceding the more specific ones:

languagesystem DFLT dflt;   <<< Don't forget this one!
languagesystem latn dflt;
languagesystem latn DEU;
languagesystem latn TRK;

In fact, AFDKO2's compareFamily complains if this line is missing. Don't ask me how I found out ... It is also mentioned explicitly in the Feature File Syntax, at the end of section 4.b. Language system.

Karsten

Edit, 2 Oct 2006:
With the current FontLab Studio 5.0.2 it is not possible to add the first extra line since it uses an older AFDKO which does not support the 'languagesystem DFLT dflt' statement. See Read Roberts' post (3 October 2006, 9:24pm) on the AFDKO2 thread. So, let's wait for the update to be able to do things right.  :)

Thanks Karsten!

ChrisL