Do you have this set in paragraphs anywhere that I can see?

The cap W is too wide and the lowercase w looks odd too. The two lower points are pointed inward.

I've just uploaded pr-AgamemnonTwentyNine-text.pdf. It contains the demo text output by FontForge at 14 pt. I hope this gives you enough to evaluate by. I don't know why there is no upper case used in the Greek passage on page 4. I'll have to ask George about that.

The spacing still needs a lot of work throughout. I haven't quite got used to FF's metrics tools.

I don't think I've ever seen a lower case w on which the lower points pointed outward rather than inward. Are you saying it should have baseline serifs or something like that?

I'm concerned by the serifs on top of the w, v, and y, since they're different from those on the other letters, but I haven't come up with a better solution that maintains the peaked and cupped form.

Should the serifs on the Cyrillic miniscules match those of the majiscules or should they be similar to those of the Latin lower case, since now they're a mixture and I want to make them consistent. They're also the same height as the Latin lower case, and they look all right to me but I don't know how that works fro someone who can actually read the things.. I've already found I had to go with something completely different for the Greek lower case with rounded top serifs.

I don't mean for the lower points (apex?) to point inward. It is a visual trick on the eye. Becase the angle is greater on the outer two strokes than the inner two it looks as if they are pointing inward.

I found a screwup with the theta (duplicate contour I hadn't noticed before). That's corrected.
I'm working on a bold and italic right now. The bold is looking pretty good, but I have some big concerns about the italic. I'll make something to show off the whole bunch really soon, I promise!

Here is a quick sample to show what the bold and italic versions of Agamemnon look like right now.

There is a matching PDF (Agamamnon30-b1-i1_text_sampler_4585.pdf) on top for closer inspection, if you like.

I just realized I mispelled the name of my own font in the filenames. No big deal, I guess. They still work.

Does nobody want to talk about this anymore?
I know there is much to be done with the kerning. I can tackle that once I figure out what's making FontForge crash when I try it.
I really need another pair of eyes to tell me if my bold is bold enough, or if my italic is, well, italic enough. Again, I ought to be able to tell for myself, but this really is my first attempt at a minimally complete family (pending the bold-italic and small cap sets), so I would greatly appreciate some nudges in the right direction.

I went and got myself a day job, so my time beating myself on the head with this has been reduced. My italic sure does stink on ice, doesn't it?

As I give it more thought, with a name like Agamemnon, the Greek and Cyrillic should be as, if not more, important than the Latin, but I really have at best a sparse and insufficient background to go on with them.

Any more demonstrations anyone wants to see?

I think your bold needs to be bolder. I think the Cyrillic is looking good, but it's hard for me to give any feedback until it's kerned. (I'm a novice type nerd, so I'm more distracted by the kerning than I ought to be.)

Not bold enough, you say? All right, I'll see what I can do about that. I think I might have to shift the x-height up a nudge too to make it a little less optically squat.

Anyone know where I can find a list of Cyrillic kerning pairs and/or words?

I don't know - I bet if you start a thread in a different forum about Cyrillic kerning pairs, that someone who does will take notice. :)

I'm about to show updated italics. I've done a lot of work polishing up many features, including the figures and those trouble children at the end of the alphabet. "y" is still being stubborn. The serifs are pretty inconsistent a this point, so I'll try to set up a survey grouping to get your impressions on which works best.

I know you're looking for comments on other things, but your the interpunct in L· and l· is quite large. I've found that sizing it to be the same as a period or an umlaut dot works better. I think it'd be distracting in a word like «Col·lecció / COL·LECCIÓ» but give it a try and see how it looks.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

I welcome any comments I can get, especially when it comes to things of which I have no firsthand knowledge.

You are quite right. Though the Unicode manual says that the interpunct in L· and l· is to be composed with the periodcentered character, that is a bit heavier than the dotaccent in this font. The umlaut dot may be even smaller. I'll try some variations and apply that which works best in the next revision. I'd rather go with the opinion of someone expert in the relevant language than the "rules" in a book any day, but being familiar primarly with English I'm pretty clueless with what to do with all these diacritics and I have to go by whatever information I can get.

Eh, I'm not expert in Catalán, I've just seen some signs here and there.

Here are some samples of dots in a variety of fonts (quite a variety in fact). Each line is lowercase U with umlaut, lowercase I, period, precomposed lowercase L with interpunct, a second lowercase L, and then a middle dot (used normally for inputting it). I'm generally of the line of thinking that the two Ls should be kerned normally just with a dot in between them.

Here's an excerpt from a detailed paper on the subject of Catalonian typographic conventions:

The present proposal consists of defining the character as a digraph formed by two letters, with a middle dot as diacritic mark. The middle dot has to be located between the two letters and equidistant from their stems. In order to facilitate reading, the middle dot has to be centered at half the height of uppercase letters. This is due to the fact that the digraph only appears between vowels. Moreover, between the two letters there has to be the same distance as there is between the two letters when they are not written with a middle dot, in order not to break continuity of words containing the digraph. There seems to be no definitive need for the middle dot to be smaller than a period, contrary to the proposal in Mestres (1990). Boldface fonts are the only ones out of 27 standard TEX fonts where a smaller middle dot would be, to the author’s taste, aesthetically more pleasant. As a matter of fact, most (if not all) old and modern printed representations of the digraph share the fact that the middle dot and the period have the same size.

However, he's discussing exclusively TEX fonts, and admitingly not in the design field at all. This other fella presents far more background and I believe based on my rudimentary knowledge of Catalonian actually works as a designer. I'll try to trudge through it more.

It may be of note that this paper which discusses the ideas of "quality typography" (and is a bit easier to read than the second article I mentioned) has a l·l with a dot significantly smaller than the period. While he is a not a designer by trade, his article is quite well written and could easily be confused with a designer (of course, I might just be seeing a different guy with the same name on google, but who knows).

Also, while I like your bold and italic capital Q, the normal one seems just a little too.... Thai-like for me.
«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

I do have a Q with the common form in the alts of the regular weight. I made about four alt Qs in fact. I just couldn't settle on one. Somehow the one with the loop and reverse seemed to work here where the reverse without loop worked elsewhere. It's worth reëxamining.

bump

Really I've been working on this a lot, though not so much over about the past month and a half while FontForge refused to acknowledge Spiro, but that's fixed with the new update. I still need to resolve this monitor issue I have, but I got a brand new used laser printer which should make testing easier once a I get it a new drum. It prints the text fine but coats the whole paper in a grainy gray where it's supposed to leave it blank.

I am glad to see you are keeping the Agamemnon fire alive. I still like it's voice a lot even though it feels a bit undisciplined set em masse. It's great to see it moving more and more text-ward as it were. I am really happy to see so many wonky/strange glyphs working so well!

Hm, I was already wondering how many people here were using FontForge rather than FontLab...

Could we set up a survey?

Szabolcs

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of font designers are using FontLab, but I'm broke and I needed features that my ancient copy of Fontographer doesn't have. It doesn't hurt that FontForge has an active development community that releases patches frequently with new features even almost monthly. Much better than waiting a decade for an OS compatibility patch that has prices starting at $99, but could vary depending on what version you have and what you want to upgrade to.

A software survey is probably better directed to the Build or General Discussions forums. I guess it would be interesting to see just how vast the majority is. I think there was a sort of a survey like that a while ago, but I don't think it quantified much.

Oh, the community is mostly the one-man-developement team, G.W., even minor bugs/feature requests are usually just reported and fixed within days by him (seldom the patch is posted by the person who discovered it).

G.W. does an incredible job. Most requests (bugs, but also feature request) are met within days. All for free.

Szabolcs

I've put together a little comparison of three Cherokee fonts:

The third example is my own design and obviously needs considerable correcting. It is difficult to determine exactly what the symbols are supposed to be, and what constitutes acceptable variation. I know I got some stuff just plain wrong. Hopefully, with some expert advice, I can fix it.

Plantagenet is very balanced and polished, but Agamemnon looks more non-Latin (which I think is central). The interesting question is, how much of that apparent functional authenticity is coming from the "fauve" finish it has (but that many people would want to eventually iron out)?

BTW, your solution to differentiating the two "R"-like shapes is great.

hhp

Determining acceptable variation is going to be somewhat of an experimental process. As I mentioned in the other thread, knowing what reader's perceptions are likely to be is a guessing game until you can find someone familiar with reading and writing Cherokee that can provide the sort of feedback that will be helpful. In the development stage, its best to analyse what few examples are available, keeping in mind that there are very few that would constitute strong typographic tradition, so cues also should be taken from the hand drawn models as well. Keep in mind that using this methodology does not guarantee that users will like what you do, but it is at least a starting point—it may not let you know what "the symbols are supposed to be", as we don't have much of an evolution of glyph form to draw from, so many of the finer details are up to the type designer. Some of the more core variations can be seen by looking at the various fonts, as there were some changes from the first (1827) to the second (1835) font and then various other mutilations occurred generally in the 20th century interpretations, most of which are not terribly instructive as to how things should look typographically, although they do inform expectations, as these are what people are used to in varying degrees. I think that handwritten examples may be more informative then many of the modern fonts.

A historical timeline such as the following is useful:

I think there is something to be said for at least thinking about how to separate some forms from their (apparent) Latin counterparts. The environment in which Cherokee is learned now is almost certainly different then it was 150+ years ago, and I imagine most all learners will already be literate in English and so will be biased as to glyph shape—probably less of a hurdle to overcome for young students then for older ones.
In the most basic approach, analyse "shared" forms: does the "i" need to look like the uppercase "T"? and what can be done to modify it away from that form while maintaining its legibility? Of course, the first metal types used an existing "T" (smallcap Didot) rather then contriving something new. Looking to Sequoyah's first for-print model, he drew several wedge-terminals as having open counters, which is a clue to one or two alternate approaches, as terminal treatments in Sequoyah's model actually have some semantic meaning, rather then just being stylistic goo-gahs.

FYI, the Plantagenet sample above is version 1 from several years ago—many of its deficiencies have been or are being addressed for version 2.

Ross, that's a fantastic timeline. Did you make it just for this thread or do you have a book with a table already made? If it's the latter, could you post the whole table?

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

That's the troublesome thing about the Cherokee symbols. Many, especially the ones apparently derived from the Latin alphabet, are virtually identical to each other, distinguished only by the style of the stroke terminals or some ornament feature (as seen from a Latin context). The most obvious error I made in that regard was placing hook terminals in many places where there should be balls. I did notice those triangular wedge serifs on some of the characters in Sequoyah’s model. I did exaggerate the serifs in my own font where they appeared, compared to similar Latin letters, but I may go even further, perhaps as much as the Cyrillic spike descenders (not shown in my current sample, but greatly enlarged in v31). I don't know about opening them, though; that might make too much visual clutter, at least at small sizes. Could be worthwhile to include in display weights, though.

Matthew,

The timeline shown is a mockup I had done which when completed may find its way into an article on the history of North American writing systems and orthographies—so no, I don’t have a complete chart at the moment, just bits and pieces.

Ah okay... Keep us posted, hopefully my university will subscribe to the journal, ILL is terrible for articles like that (they often fax and then scan and e-mail 1-bit docs ugh). Though not to pressure you (plus I know some journals don't like stuff being posted prior to publishing), when you get the table done if you wouldn't mind posting it I think I speak for many in advanced appreciation and gratitude.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Progress report:

Among things I've said before, I'm nearly ready to show another progress sample. I'm having a problem getting some of the Greek characters to appear properly, notably Delta and mu. I think it's because they are both duplicated or referred to at other points in the Unicode space, and something with Mac OSX 10.4 isn't cooperating somehow.

Anyway, the Latin section is pretty firmly set apart from spacing issues and problems with stacked accents affecting the line height. The Cyrillic set is much improved from my previous version, but still limited to basic characters and may only be suitable for Russian right now. The Greek has significant changes which could make it at least legible, but I don't really know. It is quite literally all Greek to me. There are some big changes to the Cherokee too, in light of our recent conversations.

Also I've made a quick and dirty light weight of the basic Latin characters, but that still needs tweaking.

Any preferences on who wants to see what first?

> I’m having a problem getting some of the Greek characters to appear properly, notably Delta and mu.

Just try changing the unicode name of Delta and mu to uni0394 and uni03BC respectively (right click the letter in fontforge and then click "Glyph info" and the tab "Unicode> Unicode Name").

OK, done. Would I have to make similar changes to the unicode names of the corresponding math symbols?

For me it would indeed make more sense to do that but I think it is not necessary for the font to work properly. There is also Omegagreek (0x03A9) that needs to be changed to uni03A9.

Here are the changes I made to the Cherokee:

It's spaced a bit tighter and still has no kerning. I may loosen it up a bit. I tried to bring the shapes more in line with the original handwritten sample, and also to make similar forms more distinct from each other and correct earlier errors on my part.

I'll have the other samples up tomorrow. I have to run now. Have fun with this til then.

Here is the Greek bit I've been talking about:

I had to make this shot larger than the one for the Cherokee since some details didn't show up smaller. I tried to maintain the vertical contrast that the other scripts in the font have, but I'm afraid it has made some of the letters appear awkward. Rounding the serifs seems to have helped soften the lower case without creating too much disharmony, and radical redesigns from previous versions have improved legibility, but to what extent I'm not sure.

I like the your descenders on ζ, ξ, and ς. Fits the font perfectly.

There are only a few things that really stick out to me is that the Ω seems a bit thin compared to the other caps even though I could swear it has the same weight as the O. Maybe make it a bit thicker.

I think you did a good job doing vertical contrast, I tried and failed several times to do that with greek. Normally it makes for wider characters, but for Agamemnon, it fits perfectly.

The ω seems a little wide but that might just my eyes playing tricks on me, when I compare to φ or ψ it seems the same width.

What would your alternate θ look like? It's generally a curlier design, and might go better with your font, the current one sticks out a bit as it looks too regular.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Thank you for pointing that out about omega. It actually measures the between the widths of phi and psi, but looks overly broad due to the shape. I never even knew theta is supposed to have an alternate form. So much research still to do (This is very foreign territory for me-- I'm more comfortable with Japanese.)

In the mean time, here is this:

I made the spike descenders much larger and trapezoidal. This feature is also seen on some of the Cherokee symbols shown earlier. I also unified the serifs on the lowercase and narrowed some of the letters that were analogous in the Latin set. Still, I think the lowercase may be too short, so I could make them taller on the next run through.

Also included are my currency symbols. Try and name them all!

Hey, I'm going through my Greek/Cyrillic designing stage for my font too so it's fresh on my mind. Theta/kappa/pi/omega/rho have alternate versions either used as symbols or just differently prefered forms, the theta is open and looksl like cursive, the kappa looks more like an x sort of thing, the omega is closed, rho has an extra stroke, beta has no descender, etc.

And let's see, I can almost get 'em all without cheating, dollar cent pound generic yen florin shilling common-european, um, crona franc lira ...... pesetas reais won dinar euro penny .... ruble....

The cyrillic looks good. I agree with the choice of darker descenders. I wonder if maybe on л you might want to pull the left leg in a little bit. Also, the accent on И seems a bit too far to the left. Or actually that might just be the ` as it's pretty far on the left on the E too.

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

On the acute and grave accents, I think I centered them more toward their points over letters than their actual width centers. Sometimes that method works, others not so much.

Or it could be they slid around during spacing because they're referenced. I'll have to run through the whole thing and track those buggers down.

Are you using FF's autocreation of accented glyphs?

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Are you using FF’s autocreation of accented glyphs?

Yes, so it will be easy enough to restore those to their default states. I'm just not always satisfied with the results of the auto-assembly. Stacked accents are especially a bother, as they distort the line height (at least until I correct the parameters). I tightened the line spacing to .7 to get them even this close together.

I really like the way the character of the font has been integrated with each of the additional glyph sets you have taken on. I haven't seen every Cherokee, not am I any kind of expert but it really looks lovely - and particularly from an optical & glyph divergence point of view. Very cool!

The only thing I keep wondering about is seeing it set & used in more places/ways, because use should inform the design.

I wish I could test it in more and different ways. It's a weak excuse, I know, but I'm constrained by my tools. I'm a touch too broke to upgrade my software, so the only thing I have to display the whole font without crashing on Character Pallette input is Text Edit.

As for its purpose, it's a bit too massive for an everyday text font, though it has features that should make it highly readable. It's a bit clunky with those wavy slabs.

There are not a lot of Cherokee fonts out there, as far as I can tell. Many of them are really poorly designed, like that "official" one I showed above, but are still considered usable by those who use them. In my opinion Plantagenet is the most thoughtful and best looking example of a Cherokee font I've ever seen, but even Ross Mills concedes that it is deficient in its current form. I have done scarcely any research on the matter, in comparison, and I consider it high praise that anyone with even casual expertise commends my efforts.

I checked out the new touches to your CWY font. I LIKE IT! It's really a clear departure from the same old same old. In fact, I believe that learners of the language would probably have an easier time in learning this font because it's different and dynamic.

I believe I mentioned that I'm a teacher of our language and I'll be teaching two more classes starting next month. I teach Cherokee for the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees.

Anyway, I'm not sure what kind of expertise I have in the work that you are doing in creating fonts but I have been reading and writing in the language most of my life and I've seen alot of different ways of making the symbols in the system. So what you are doing is okay by me. Though I'm no spokesperson for either tribe. However, I am a sixth generation descendent of the original Sequoyah and I believe he would like what you are trying to do. Keep it up and let me know when you are ready to show it off a bit. I'll use it in my classes.

Okay, I'm sorry. The above post was my first reaction to the great work you're doing. But after I really pondered over your latest chart there are a couple of things that I should mention. Nothing great - just a few observations.

1 - the first symbol should be down at the last of your chart. (unless you did this for a purpose) It's part of the vowels.

2 - the "doh" symbol threw me for a second. It's downside up. I'm cool with that but that leads me to the third thing.

3 - The Keetoowah and some elder Cherokees are very traditional and though I see nothing wrong with creating a font such as yours, some of the people will not go for it because it's so different (which is what I like about it). They are very weary of change. It usually takes a while for new things to catch on with them. However, at the same time, if they see the young people taking to it - the elders will let it slide because the younger generation is accepting it. One of the things that's going for your font is the fact that it looks gothic (sorry but I just had to say it - but hey! gothic Cherokee, cool). And our young people will like that.

Again, I like what you're doing. I'd like to see it finished.

Thank you, this is exactly the sort of advice I need. As a teacher of the language, you necessarily have a deeper technical understanding that even native speakers and writers may lack, so I certainly consider you to be an expert. I'll give more weight to your opinions than many other peoples research. On to your points:

1. Indeed you are correct, and in checking my materials I understand why I did it like that and why you are right.
For some reason the V (shaped like "i") appears first in Plantagenet Cherokee when entered from the character palette. In Agamemnon, it appears sixth on the character palette, which is still incorrect, but that is where it is in the Unicode sequence. At least it appears after A (D), E (R with hook), I (T), O (Ꭳ), and U (O with horn), which are all the open vowels without consonants, so they belong on the same row together. For some reason Unicode has them at the beginning, rather than the end, which you suggest is correct. A logical argument could be made to put them either at the beginning or the end, but I'll go with your advice on the customary position when I produce my next sample.

2. DO is "V" shaped in the official font, and I will adjust mine to reflect that in adherence with custom. I gave it the "Λ" shape because it appears that way both in the Plantagenet font and in this scan of an early sketch of the syllabary attributed to Sequoyah:

But doesn't the V shape of DO sometimes lead to confusion with TSE?
I also noticed that the "A" shaped GO has a vertical stroke on the crossbar in this sample, not seen on other examples, but that is why I included it on mine.
I also expect my design of YI might be controversial.
DE has confused me, since it is one of several "S" shaped symbols, which looks just mangled in the official font and is distinguished from DU only by a twisted serif and half a line across the middle. In my DE I tried to make that cross stroke suggest a reversal, as if a "c" were drawn above a reversed "c" in a single motion, rather than as an "S". Does this sound reasonable to you?

3. I'm not sure what to say about this. In the scripts of most languages, there is a lot of room for stylistic variation and decoration, but it's generally an issue of aesthetic preference unless you go so far with the design as to get something actually "wrong". With the CWY it's hard to tell what right and wrong even is, so I appreciate the assistance you've given me and any more you give in the future. The only connection I have with the language is that my parents went to Sequoia High School in Redwood City, CA, and the place was most likely named after the tree.

I'm always cautious using the term "Gothic" around here. It has at least two nearly opposite meanings in typography which have little to do with the architecture, fashion/lifestyle trends, or Germanic tribes sharing that name.

Another thing I notice about the Omega is that it doesn't quite live up to the overall personality of the face. I'd suggest making each bend into a squared double bend, more 5-like than 2-like... In case I haven't explained it well, fonts with this kind of Omega include Jupiter and Poseidon.

Yes, I see what you mean about the Omega now. I'm just afraid if I do that either the whole letter will become too narrow, or the top will look fat. Well, I'll give it a try and post a comparison in a little bit.

Thaks Cuttlefish for the image posting tips. I will apply them all.

I agree that gothic was a wrong choice of words. I should have said it looked "arcane". Anyway, my point is this: the font you've developed has a progressive look that is not only a feast for the eye but it will help promote the learning of the language in general. If a writing system is to exist in fifty, a hundred years - it will have to evolve just as the spoken language has to change.

I would say keep the DO just as you have it. Although it threw me for a couple of seconds, it is (as you pointed out) how it is in the earlier chart.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I've read many, many examples of the hand written language. And during these readings, you would be amazed at how creative the elders were with some of the symbols by putting their own little creative twists to them. I remember watching my father practice his hand writing and when he was finished - the end results were almost calligraphic. Folks would comment about how pretty his writing was.

Again, my point is this: Finish your font. It's different and fresh. I, for one (and again, I'm no spokesperson for either tribe), am not so closed minded or afraid of change that I would want to stick with the same old tired "Offical" font. I would use your font, if nothing else than just to be different. It's useable and readable.

In view of the raised topic (Omega), I am posting a page with altenate designs of Omega.

By the way, the Greek typedesigners usually keep width of the oval shape of Omega at the same size as the oval of the Latin letter 'O'. There are deviations from that of course and we can make the Omega a bit wider, but this happens rarely.

Also, note that the horizontal bar at the baseline of Omega is always the same sroke width as in the letters 'Xi' and 'Sigma'.

Although the YI might be confused with O, it's still different. But this is one of the things I like about your font.

Ga, De and Du are always confusing to the novice. But after they really start getting into it they begin to tell the difference between the three.

So, Quo and Yi are the only ones that might be thought of as really different but I don't believe it will cause that much trouble.

As I said, they are all readable. I can hardly wait until you deem your font finished.

However, there is one thing about me that you should probably know. I'm sort of a maverick in teaching our language. You would think that people around here would all know how to speak in our own language, but such is not the case. All three tribes are scrambling to teach the language to the younger generation, hence the language classes sponsered by the tribes. But where other classes teach reading and writing right off - I've always believed that the folks needed to speak first. So that's what I begin with. I teach my students how to say words and phrases first before I get them into reading and writing. I don't believe other classes do this. They go straight into reading and writing. So in this matter, I'm... kinda different from other teachers of our language. Which might explain why I look forward to your release of your font. I believe the new look will spark a desire in the youth to learn how to use the syllabary and ultimately learn their own language.

Cuttlefish, I have just posted the AlternateDesignOfGreekCharacters.pdf that I promised at Semele (previously known as Thetis). I belive that you will find it of some interest to you in respect to designing Greek characters.

Someone posted this link in another thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_characters_in_Unicode

Through that I've managed to explore the usage and meaning of some of the more obscure characters. There is some weird stuff in there. A lot of obsolete IPA glyphs in particular.

A lot of obsolete IPA glyphs in particular.

What in particular do you mean?

well, there's the db and qp ligatures, a whole bunch with curls and hooks, um... darn I'll have to sift through the thing again.

suffice it to say, at the time I did it, I had just got a hold of the Unicode PDFs and went crazy trying to fill in every Latin slot there is, and included a whole bunch of stuff that of use to very few people, and some that is of no use to anyone, except perhaps for archaic orthographies. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

I would agree that IPA is not used by many people, but as a linguist, I don't find the glyphs obsolete. I wouldn't expect them in every typeface, but it is nice to have choices.

I have not put in many of the IPA characters as listed on its separate Unicode range, just those that happened to lie on other Latin pages. Have a look through the latest PDF I posted above. (I thought I had more up there. I'll have to replace those that I think are missing.)
Let me know if you need any IPA characters that aren't included, or if any of the included ones are malformed.

I would agree that IPA is not used by many people, but as a linguist, I don’t find the glyphs obsolete.

There are obsolete IPA glyphs too (glyphs that have now been replaced by different forms, especially at Kiel 1989) and I think they are in Unicode for backward compatibility with prior 8-bit encodings. They should probably be included in any font that has the IPA, though, because it may be necessary to set documents created using earlier versions of the IPA.

Ack who left a tag open? [edit: apparently me ... but the italic thing is recent and that post of mine is ages old]

The trick for IPA is making sure that you leave combining mark information for every single glyph that can be used in IPA. (I'm going overboard at the moment with Coruña and including top, bottom, top-right, overlay, and cedilla marks for EVERY SINGLE alphabetic character and most symbols haha, but that's abnormal).

I'm going to try to get myself a nice document with lots of close IPA transcription that will include the potential double or triple diacritics on some of the letters (oh yes, I forgot, you need combining marks on your combining marks :) )

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

There are obsolete IPA glyphs too (glyphs that have now been replaced by different forms, especially at Kiel 1989)

Officially obsolete, yes, but linguists just love using all kinds of signs. Not everyone transcribes using "approved" IPA.

Some lingering problems:

I'd like to be able to output a limited version of the font, say, containing only the characters designated in the Adobe Latin 2 character list. I don't presently know how to do this.

I also am having trouble resolving the linespacing issues resulting from stacked diacritics.

These are probably better asked on the FontForge users ML, after reading the manual, but it's what I'm stuck on for the moment.

Hi cuttlefish, I like the Agamemnon Greek very much, superb zeta, xi and sigma1. Its characters have a distinct and definitely novel look. Have you designed the Extended Greek characters by the way?

I haven't attempted any Greek extensions. I had a hard enough time getting it this far, being totally unfamiliar with that alphabet before making this attempt. I'm glad you like what I've done so far.

Hi cuttlefish,

I think you should lower the glyphs with the bended lower serifs. If you put those – for example, lc l — and a circular glyph (which needs to overshoot), then word would look really odd. Maybe try putting the apex of the arc of the bended lower serif at the baseline and let its serifs overshoot?

That aside, I like the figures very much, especially 4.

–Josef

The cupped serifs are designed to compensate for the round letters short overshoot. I tried making the overshoot greater before and they looked odd.

I also am having trouble resolving the linespacing issues resulting from stacked diacritics.
Which kind of trouble? I ask because I've had to solve myself recently a linespacing issue, and often it's enough to adjust the "Typolinegap" value, to avoid cutting-offs.

As far as line spacing, the design rides low on the em, as I've heard it put, so it appears small relative to many other fonts set at the same point size, but also I find that the main version with the full complement of stacked diacriticals (for Vietnamese and Livonian support) the space between the lines is much greater than the versions without those glyphs.

I really must move my monitor so I can thoroughly read my software's documentation without headaches.

Jason, you use FontForge, yeah?

Element -> Font Info... -> OS/2 -> Metrics.

Take the non-accented file and uncheck "Is Offset" by all of those fields. Those are the numbers you'll want to manually input to your accented file if you want the accented one to have exactly the same line height (this will cause overlap of course with some combinations).

«El futuro es una línea tan fina que apenas nos damos cuenta de pintarla nosotros mismos». (La Luz Oscura, por Javier Guerrero)

Yes I do use FontForge. Thanks for the tip.

Welcome back! I finally got a new monitor, a beautiful and affordable Acer H213H, so all those CRT artifacts I kept griping about are a thing of the past.

Now, on to the revision. I've let this sit a long time, but I finally got around to fixing the line height in the manner guifa suggested. I've kind of lost track of what else I changed between this and the last one, but I'm sure most of the comments were taken into account. Now that the new release of FontForge has the print setup bug fixed, I can output its sample directly to PDF (see newest attached file "pr-AgamemnonThirtyFive.pdf" in the first post).

Damn, a few months really does bring the bugs to light! I thought I'd just be working on the spacing and kerning and tweaking accent positions at this point but I'm making some fundamental changes to important glyph shapes like "a" again.

I should have version 36 up before too long. In the meantime, let me know if you spot any glaring problems in the current sample.

I've sat on this for nearly a year again, haven't I?
I generated the 36th test version today and will have samples up shortly in the style Hrant recommended in http://typophile.com/node/66781.

All righty! Finally some progress. "agamemnon36-12ptsample.pdf" is up on top. The character set is entered in the order they appear in Unicode. I included excerpts from Wikipedia in the four major scripts as well as a section in Anglo-Saxon to draw out some of the more exotic Latin characters. This is set at 12pt with normal line spacing. It seems I've tackled the growth factor that the stacked accents brought in. Somewhere along the line the alignment of some accents shifted. That needs to be corrected.

I made some significant changes in the Cherokee glyphs, some of which are sure to be controversial, and I am open to changing them back if that's what the language requires.

I did notice a strange phenomenon when entering the combining accents one after another; they stacked on top of each other, creating a bit of a smear through the line above them.

Added a PDF regarding the Cherokee syllable "de"

It has come to my attention that there is a free font being circulated by the name of PR Agamemnon by Peter Rempel. Since he brought it out to the public before I did, I won't dispute his claim to the name, not that anyone could claim a historic figure as a trademark anyway. Still, that leaves me with finding a new name for this thing. Any suggestions?

I would stay in the same field. The first paragraph of the Agamemnon article on Wikipedia, for example, lists several names of people or places suitable for a typeface.

My vote would be to totally keep the name Agamemnon, its so heavy metal! but regrettably, it has been claimed.
riccard0 is right though, that wiki entry is absolutely full of possibilities. the genealogy map is a good start.

Aw crud, I've gone and revived the older portion of this thread. Blech. This font started out scary looking and has evolved into an entirely different monster. Anyway, for the sake of getting it all in one place, here are those screenshots of the currency symbols again:

What, no Dram?
http://typophile.com/node/64976

hhp

Tragically, I forgot the Dram, not least because it's not in the main Unicode currency symbols block. So I just made one, and included it with all the legacy encoding currency marks I already had:

I guess that leaves the Afghani, Rial, and Khmer Riel

That was fast! But the top-left shouldn't be so droopy - more like a short stem.

hhp

Hopefully this dram will look more assertive. I also made some changes to the sterling and bhat.

Funky, but could work.

hhp