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fonttools / fontbakery

🧁 A font quality assurance tool for everyone
https://fontbakery.readthedocs.io
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New check: napostrophe - suggest that we check for the presence of this glyph which is depreciated and warn to remove it. #4861

Open EbenSorkin opened 1 month ago

EbenSorkin commented 1 month ago

What needs to be checked?

(napostrophe - suggest that we check for the presence of this glyph which is depreciated and warn to remove it.)

Detailed description of the problem

napostrophe is a glyph in old glyph sets and even has a unicode ( 0149 ) but it is depreciated as a mistake in unicode now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-apostrophe

Resources and steps needed to reproduce the problem

Just check for the presence of the unicode code point in the font I think.

Suggested profile

Suggest which profile the check should be added to. The most common are:

Note sure but: ( ? )

Suggested result

Which log result level should the check have:

Severity assessment

(Classify the problem on a scale of 1 (minor) to 5 (major). How "buggy" would the font be considered if it had the problem described?)

3?

felipesanches commented 1 month ago

From that wikipedia article:

The Unicode standard recommends that a sequence of an apostrophe followed by n (’n) be used to encode this diagraph.[1] (A precomposed character form was included in Unicode for legacy ISO/IEC 6937 and CP853 document compatibility, as U+0149 ʼn LATIN SMALL LETTER N PRECEDED BY APOSTROPHE, but its use is deprecated.[2] The use of deprecated characters such as ʼn is "strongly discouraged".[3] However it continues to be used in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications, probably to avoid the tendency of auto-correction software (designed for English quotation marks) to turn a typed 'n (straight apostrophe, n) into ‘n (left single quotation mark, n), which is incorrect but common (rather than the correct form, ’n). The code point has been removed from some computer fonts, such as Charis SIL and Doulos SIL.)

The upper case, or majuscule form has never been included in any international keyboards and is not encoded as a precomposed character. It may be generated by combining (U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) and N to create ʼN.

felipesanches commented 1 month ago

@EbenSorkin, I'm a bit concerned about the part that says "However it continues to be used in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications,"

EbenSorkin commented 1 month ago

Some of it being used probably has to do with really old keyboards IBM made still being used. And there are " roughly 46 million people who speak Afrikaans as a first or second language worldwide. "

46 Million is not that trivial a number. 😅

But since you can make it "by combining (U+02BC ʼ MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BC) and N https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N" maybe we should encourage this to conform to Unicode?

Perhaps we should include it but perform a calt transformation in the font to the now orthodox unicode model for shaping as standard in SSA and PRI level fonts?

On Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 6:18 PM Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches < @.***> wrote:

@EbenSorkin https://github.com/EbenSorkin, I'm a bit concerned about the part that says "However it continues to be used in the Afrikaans versions of Facebook and other publications,"

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/fonttools/fontbakery/issues/4861#issuecomment-2415268099, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAQUQXPJCTMHEJCNLYJVGWLZ3WIE7AVCNFSM6AAAAABPZFWVW6VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDIMJVGI3DQMBZHE . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: @.***>

rimas-kudelis commented 1 month ago

A suggestion that a character should be removed from a font would sound quite weird, I think. Is the goal of such suggestion to actively discourage the users from using it by making it somewhat inaccessible?