What is the intended use of commaccent.salt?

Cristobal Henestrosa13 Jan 2011

Probably this is an easy one.

For the very first time I am trying to add Central European diacritics for a font I am designing. I am using the new encodings that appear in FontLab Studio if you have installed Fontographer 5 (either the full version or the demo). I am using the encoding called “OpenType LatPro”.

I did some readings online and watched some fonts who include the glyphs proposed by this encoding and so far I think I am doing right, but I am unable to find what is commaccent.salt for.

I have read at typo.cz that “In Latvian, the use of cedilla is wrong, the correct shape of the accent is a small comma under letter. Both for technical and aesthetic reasons, the comma accent is drawn above the lower case ģ, rotated by 180 degrees”, and I am aware about Adam Twardoch’s recommendations quoted on that same page regarding Scedilla, scedilla, S with commaaccent, s with commaaccent, T with cedilla, t with cedilla, T with commaaccent, and t with commaaccent. Everything clear, but I still don’t know what to put inside the commaccent.salt slot. Any help appreciated.

twardoch15 Jan 2011#

The commaaccent.salt slot is indeed intended for the 180-degree rotated commaaccent which is to be placed above g. The caron.salt is intended for the "upright-acute"/"apostrophe-shaped" variant of caron, intended for use with d, t, l and L.

Cristobal Henestrosa15 Jan 2011#

Thank you Adam. That was exactly my thought, since uni0123 (ģ) is the only character that presents a variant for commaaccent, but I just wanted to be sure. And it is good to know that I was right about the caron.salt.

Thanks!

twardoch15 Jan 2011#

Indeed, there is only one character that uses commaaccent.salt, yet it's still useful to make it into a component, and make uni0123 a composite glyph primarily so that the "g" glyph is a component, which makes things like hinting easier.

Cristobal Henestrosa15 Jan 2011#

Thank you for you clarification, Adam. Useful as always.

There is one other small thing I am curious about this encoding – not a problem, just wanna know the story behind the inclusion of the longs_t ligature. It is unrelated with this thread, so it will be better to start a new one. Hope you can answer me that one, too. Thanks in advance.

Kristians Sics15 Jan 2011#

I am usually rotating the composite commaaccent, aligning the bottom with a dot on i. It works and you do not need an extra glyph.

twardoch16 Jan 2011#

Kristians,

There are, of course, many ways to achieve a certain goal. Having an extra glyph is the simplest solution, and works well with various automatic glyph-creation mechanisms. Also, it works with all tools. Rotated components may work with some font-creation tools, but may not work with others.

Best,
Adam

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 26 Apr 2015. original URL