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The Daltaí Boards » Archive: 2005- » 2010 (March-April) » Archive through April 30, 2010 » A Roman typeface for the old spelling « Previous Next »

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Daveat168
Member
Username: Daveat168

Post Number: 80
Registered: 08-2009


Posted on Sunday, April 25, 2010 - 05:21 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

A chairde, Dia daoibh,
While searching for a functional typeface for use in my project of retypesetting the pronouncing dictionary, I came upon this:-

Latin-style fonts with dotted consonants — how to avoid repeating past mistakes.

In Latin-style fonts which offer dotted consonants — which potentially includes all Latin-style Unicode fonts — we must design the dotted consonants in such a way as to avoid the mistakes disfiguring the few books which appeared in this script in pre-computer days.

Guidelines would necessarily include:

the dot-over accent must be sufficiently prominent, and certainly more prominent than the dot on lowercase i — and it may even be desirable to use dotless i (perhaps with its top serif horizontal). The excessively inconspicuous nature of the dot, even in established Gaelic-style fonts, is manifested in the difficulty of training OCR software to recognise its presence or absence with any degree of reliability.

the dot-over accent must be at the same height on all the lowercase letters, including those with ascenders like b, d, f, t. This is what gives Gaelic script its tidy appearance, and (most) accents in Latin script are also at a uniform height for lowercase. There should not be a problem with b and d, though a top serif on d may need to be removed or turned around. The top of t may be truncated. Lowercase f may be lowered, and a descender may be allowed — something like a script f but not going into the ascender area. But the style of these letters must remain thoroughly Latin and not be Gaelicised. (Compare the opinions of William Britton quoted on pages 190–2 of McGuinne's "Irish Type Design"; also now the f and t of Úrchló Rómhánach v7.20.)

it is not absolutely necessary that a round dot be used at all, and we should experiment visually with other possibilities, to achieve the necessary distinctiveness, and uniformity over a variety of base letters; these possibilities might include an elliptical dot; or a macron (though not a long thin one), which might be allowed to cross the verticals of b and d, though it could not be allowed to cross f and t since they already have a crossbar without lenition.

At:http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/~oduibhin/mearchlar/latindots.htm

I read this with interest, and pondered, then like lightning, I saw:
Seanchló is basically an uncial manuscript font.
The only difference between a capital letter, and a normal letter in such a font is size.
Thus any font which fully supports the required unicode, and can be style formatted as 'small caps' will provide all that is needed to encode the old spelling in accordance with the above requirements.
The non Gaelic fonts I found, native to my Mac, which comply with the above are:
American Typewriter, Arial Unicode, Courier, Cracked, Geneva, Handwriting - Dakota, Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Microsoft sans Serif, Monaco, Palatino, and Times, but NOT T new Roman.
My preference is though for Lucida Grand, as it has good big square shévís.

Is mise, le meas,
Déghebh.

ps, I tried to contact the author with this observation, but his spam filter rejected me.
I hope that he might read this board.
ps2, If there is any interest, I have prepared a small document which illustrates the use of small caps in this way.

Mar sin, dá vriy sin, níl byart níws críwnna
'Ná veyh go síwrrwiye ag cur pryab san ól.
(MLS)
Rıocard Baıréad.

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Antaine
Member
Username: Antaine

Post Number: 1459
Registered: 10-2004


Posted on Sunday, April 25, 2010 - 08:40 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

This is something I would absolutely love to see. Based on long experience, I find that English speakers have less trouble with a dot than the h.

My t-shirt line uses the dot with the latin letters, although, not all of those fonts had it as part of unicode:

http://www.cafepress.com/siopagaeilge

Although, it's been some time...there are some products that need to come down and some new ideas that need to go up.

Still...I'm totally behind any effort to either revive seancló as the standard text or use latin letters with the ponc.

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Daveat168
Member
Username: Daveat168

Post Number: 81
Registered: 08-2009


Posted on Sunday, April 25, 2010 - 10:17 am:   Small TextLarge TextEdit Post Print Post

A chairde, Dia daoibh!
SmallCaps.pdf, a selection of the fonts on my machine.
Only Gadelica is non-native.
http://www.box.net/shared/k3q2epmiyd
Lucida Grande.pdf, is a selection based on LG in SmallCaps, Bold, Italic, showing some modern text presented in smallcap, 'Roman seanchló'.
There are also some other fonts for comparison.
http://www.box.net/shared/zcnecfarja
Le meas,
Déghebh.

Mar sin, dá vriy sin, níl byart níws críwnna
'Ná veyh go síwrrwiye ag cur pryab san ól.
(MLS)
Rıocard Baıréad.



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