Typography
From DejaVu
Contents |
General Typography
- Typography on Wikipedia
- Microsoft Typography (e.g. OpenType specification)
- Czech-English magazine TYPO
- PANOSE Classification Metrics Guide
- Typeforge (might contain some useful information on FontForge and font design)
Accents and Diacritical marks
- accents table and links on Typo.cz (partly in Czech, some linked resources in English)
- Diacritics Project @ Typo.cz
- essay "Problems of diacritic design for Latin script text faces" (in PDF, home page)
As far as DejaVu specific changes and accented characters go:
- In general, accents should have same / similar vertical positions - for example, the position of the grave accent in some new character with the grave accent should have the same y-axis postion as the grave accent in existing characters, especially those inherited from Vera - like say "à".
- The same applies to uppercase characters, except that instead of regular accents, special uppercase variants should be used in most cases. These are unmapped and are at the end of the glyphs in Fontforge.
- When designing new accents, an uppercase variant should also be made alongside the lowercase one.
- When designing new accents, care should be taken to see that characters with the new accents blend well with existing ones, whether standing side by side or on their own. For example, the macron was positioned so that its center would align with the center of diaresis.
- ALWAYS use references, unless you are merging the outlines.
- It is most probably worthwhile checking that the order of character references in .sfd file is in the right order, that is, base glyph first followed by accent, not vice versa.
Combining Diacritical Marks
Combining diacritical marks (Unicode ranges U+0300 - U+036F, U+1DC0 - U+1DFF, U+20D0 - U+20FF, U+FE20 - U+FE2F) are a bit special (except for Mono):
- They must have have zero width.
- Outlines must have negative x coordinate (x going from negative on the left to positive on the right).
- Spacing modifier glyph ("independent" diacritical mark) should exist and combining mark should reference it (if they look alike is not always the case).
In DejaVu Sans Mono combining marks look like any other monospaced glyph (this may change in a future - see relevant post on maling list).
- monowidth combining diacritics that should be zero-width could be fixed through opentype features:
- Glyphs info -> Pos, New
- ΔX: -1233, ΔX advance: -1233, Tag: ? (ccmp, kern, or another required Latin feature maybe), Script: latn(dflt)
- This will only work with font renderers handling OpenType Latin feature.
See Combining diacritics for special features.
