On 30 Sep 2005, at 0:28, Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote: > Why would you do this? There is SIL Doulos, and Junicode at the very > least for serif; I think Everson has some sans fonts with this kind of > material.
Believe me, I've tried SIL Doulos. There are numerous problems with it -- 1) It has no typesetting niceties -- ligatures and true small caps, for example -- and there are only two weights. 2) It is not properly coded. It was coded so that one could use a standard American keyboard and type certain letters, which would then produce the character. For example, the esh is coded to the S. Thererfore the font lacks an actual S character. This was done so they could create a keyboard template, which is provided along with the font. 3) It was designed to be an adjunct to Times. In other words, since it lacks an actual S, one is supposed to use a normal times font for ordinary writing, and then switch to the Doulos font when IPA characters are needed. This is time-consuming, plus the Doulos font does not exactly match any extant version of Times. Furthermore, I personally dislike Times, as it is too hackneyed. 4) Because of the odd coding, you get different results from different programs. For example, in OpenOffice.org Writer the esh appears on screen, but a different character is output to my Adobe PostScript printer. In Word on Windows 2000, the esh works, but I get similar unpredictable results with other characters. You never know what you're going to end up with in the final output. One of my professors uses Windows XP and the latest version of Word on both his office computer and his home computer. He says it works on his home computer but he gets different results on his office computer. Not acceptable for DTP work that may have to go to an imagesetter. 5) It is available for free, but copyright is held by the Summer Institute of Languages, a fundamentalist Christian organization in Texas whose goal is to translate the bible into as many languages as possible in order to convert the heathens. This does not set well with many university folks. At this point the best font I have found is Gentium. It has a pretty full character set for DTP work, but there is only one weight. It seems to be pretty well coded, but not 100%. For example, the tie bar appears on screen and prints as a ?. Also, although it is available for free, about a year ago the author transferred the copyright to the Summer Institute of Languages. There are also the Adobe Stone Phonetic fonts, but again, they lack all the features needed for DTP work -- only one weight, no ligatures, small caps, etc. I do not have them so I cannot say whether they are properly coded. I assume, however, that Adobe would at least make sure they were unicode compliant and that they tested them with various programs. There is also the problem that they are not free, a drawback for university students. I just paid over $800 for textbooks for fall term here. I would not be pleased if a prof required me to buy a set of Adobe fonts. OK, maybe a small amount would be acceptable. Even the Adobe fonts might be acceptable if Adobe offered academic prices, but they do not for their fonts. I have also tried a number of other freeware IPA fonts, but all have one or more of the above listed problems. What is needed is a complete OpenType font with all the cool alternate characters for DTP work, plus all the IPA characters in the right unicode slots. I have to admit my knowledge of font creation and unicode is deficient. But I do know some things about fonts, and I'm not completely stupid. It would be a massive undertaking for me alone, but I am hoping that I can find someone in the open source community who has already created a pretty good font and who would let me collaborate to add the IPA characters and whatever DTP stuff is missing. I do have a Windows 2000 computer, so I could use Fontlab. But the academic price is 50% off the regular price of $649. That's still pretty steep. Hence my search for a good Linux font editor. My goal is to start by using it to enhance my knowledge and skills for font creation, while also searching for possible collaborators and scoping out what fonts are currently available and adaptable in the open source community.
