A tie-in to some of the other discussions relating user modification and/or supplementing of an existing font — something I’m quite conscious about, since I already may have broken the EULA, or at least stretched it to a breaking point!
My main field of typesetting is in linguistics. Not your average translation stuff, but the university side: descriptional (languages from all over the world — I stopped counting), historical (Proto-Indic; but also 17c English), orthographic (showing different forms of the capital of ’ŋ’ — “eng” — there are at least two varieties), and phonetic /fəˈnɛtɪk/ — not all browsers will display the required characters!
There are lots of phonetic fonts out there, but a lot are put together by willing amateurs (non Unicode; missing italic, bold, and bold italic), and there are certainly none even close to the base font I use for plain text. So I[*] created a Unicode compliant set of additional characters as a stand-alone font, in all required styles. And here comes the snag.
An upside down ’e’ in this font is created by copying a base font ’e’ and inverting it. A small capital ’R’ (that’s the uvular trill; not a regular American “arrr” but the clear one in “garçon”) is copied plainly from the base font small caps set. It has to be copied because it has a Unicode point of its own! The voiceless retroflex plosive (don’t ask me — I didn’t make up the names) looks like this ’ʈ’ — a lowercase ’t’ with a lowered bottom, shaped more like a ’j’. And so on — the characters are all based on Latin, but may have any amount of alterations.
It gets worse with added accents: acutes and carons are readily available, usually already in combination with often-used characters. But I need them up/under/through virtually any possible character, and sometimes even stacked upon eachother! No worries: I copy all available accents directly from the base font, add a few handfuls of ones Adobe didn’t think of (small plus above; inverted breve; lots more), create OTF tables to combine them in a fashionable way with my own extended set of glyphs ... and then I need the same for the regular set of Latin characters! So I copied these as well — ’a’ to ’z’ — and copy their kerning tables too, then position the accents for these as well,. That’s where my conscience really began to work. To be totally in control, I would need to add even more characters from the original font, virtually up to the moment I would not even need the original. I might as well put my entire set into the original font!
It has been mentioned that Adobe doesn’t mind adjusting fonts for ’private use’, but, as this is to be put in books, that seems stretching their indulgance quite a lot, even though this new font has no commercial purpose on itself. I have no intentions at all to sell it as ’the’ linguistic set, and up to now I am extremely wary of sharing it, even within the publishing cy I do this work for.
Who can sooth my worries? Alternatively, what can I do without having to worry about the Font Police?
[*] TBTH, building heavily upon the work of a previous colleague, who had a large part in the initial development. But now I’m on my own.
