Place ĥ circumflex over stem

[inferno986return]

The lowercase letter ĥ used in Esperanto often has a strange placement due to its rare usage.

Can I request when the circumflex is placed that it's directly above the stem?

[topological-modular-forms]

Yep! I personally prefer placing the circumflex on top of the stem as well :)

In fact, I was looking into the old version¹ of the Regular style (the one that has more glyphs, before I decided to instead focus on designing all styles (bold, italic, etc.) for basic Latin before moving into expanding the glyph set), and noticed I actually already designed it like this:

Note to self: I should read more about why there are different placements of the circumflex for the ĥ; maybe there are extra considerations that are not immediately clear just from the glyph in isolation.

[inferno986return]

From my research, as with the rest of the circumflexed consonants used by Esperanto (č, ĝ, ĵ, ŝ), the lowercase letter ĥ is unique as it's the only letter where the circumflex arguably shouldn't be placed in the centre.

There are at least 4 circumflex placements for ĥ:

1. In the centre, examples include Segoe UI, Ubuntu, King's Caslon
2. On the shoulder, examples include Linux Libertine (or Libertinus)
3. On the stem, like Darwin does above
4. Off-centre to the right of the stem where the left side aligns with the stem

Placement above the stem makes the most sense and is the most aesthetically pleasing to me. Perhaps other placements can be included as stylistic alternates?

I haven't seen the Esperanto community debate the ideal placement of the circumflex. I guess there's a shortage of Esperanto typographers, your guess is as good as mine. 🙂

[eclecticfluff]

I hardly know anything about the language, but can attest to the fact that there is no shortage of typographical debate. The issues https://github.com/alerque/libertinus/issues/329 Has already been refrenced twice before on other open source fonts on the subject of this prickly matter. As far as I can tell from the discussions from where it came up that it’s a matter of subjectivity, but that doesn’t stop people from having very strong prefrences. Having provisions for both high and low positions with a font feature seems to be the safest way to go.

[inferno986return]

@eclecticfluff I appreciate the insight.

Esperanto definitely creates problems for traditional diacritic placement because it uses consonants, which few natural languages use, Maltese letters Ġ ġ are the only examples I have to hand.

When I tried my hand at Esperanto book typesetting I did have to make leading considerations for certain sentences starting with Ĉ, Ĝ ,ĵ, Ŝ. I don't think Zamenhof thought of this, but I understand he wanted to ensure phonetic consistency and that Esperanto was relatively easy to type up on late 19th-century typewriters.

If there isn't a universal consensus then the solution is stylistic alternates and let the Esperanto typesetter decide for themselves. 😊