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TiroTypeworks / Indigo

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Could you help me with Kannada? (Dotted circle only!) #46

Open Mercury13 opened 2 years ago

Mercury13 commented 2 years ago

I’m the author of Unicodia, encyclopedia of Unicode characters. And I see that Tiro is the best open Kannada serif font ever! But I cannot use it right now for three reasons.

  1. U+0CF3 Kannada sign Combining anusvara above right is missing. You know that and you’ve told that it needs non-trivial rules, I won’t jump in.

The rest two issues are related to dotted circle.

  1. Make dotted circle visibly lighter than umlauts.
  2. Correctly position vowel marks on dotted circle.

image

Thank you!

tiroj commented 2 years ago

Because most of the vowel signs in Kannada are never positioned as combining marks, but always graphically merge with the base consonant to form a ligature, I do not classify them as marks in the GDEF table and do not provide any anchor positioning for them. These glyphs are never expected to be displayed in Kannada text, and only exist as pathways from the Unicode character to the ligatures. I understand that the context in which you want to display these glyphs is atypical and it is the Unicode characters themselves rather than their functional use that you want to display. However, every glyph that gets classified as a mark in the GDEF table becomes a complication in the layout intelligence of the font, as it needs to be filtered in or out of multiple lookups, and I try to avoid that. I will review this issue when I work on the Kannada updates, and see whether I can provide the positioning you want without causing headaches elsewhere.

The dotted circle is currently a standard glyph across the Tiro Indic fonts. Possibly it’s size might be more tailored to the individual scripts.

Mercury13 commented 2 years ago

Not size but overall lightness of dotted circle. As it’s intended for showcasing umlauts, it should be lighter than umlauts themselves. Size — only if its position is really poor.