Zompist Bboard Again

I think I have seen bomb used with the meaning of 'flop'. You have. The phrase “box office bomb” refers to a massively unsuccessful picture, and “to bomb” can mean “to fail (at) something totally”, as in “I bombed the exam”. But going like a bomb is the exact opposite of bombing . Bad, eh? I suppos...

I think I’m not making my confusion entirely clear. The two mappings you listed are as follows: head_x body_y → head_x body_y_blanked (1 rule) head_x body_y_blanked → body_y head_dia_x body_y_blanked (14 rules) But as far as I can see, this could just as easily be done with only one mapping, namely...

Yes, this seems somewhat ridiculously baroque to me. More to the point, it’s a reasonably strong linguistic universal that stress position cannot depend on the value of the syllable onset. Yea! Another oddity for English (Middle Class Southern English?), where the vowel after a cluster -Ch- has to ...

So, for the CV combinations without a length mark, the mapping goes: 1) Backing store has characters <x><y>. 2) The CMAP table converts this to the glyph sequence head_x body_y 3) One contextual lookup converts this to head_x body_y_blanked 4) The 14 contextual lookups then convert this to body_y h...

OK, you’ve lost me here… what’s body_y_blanked supposed to be? And how does it help to flip head_x body_y → body_y head_x (which appears to be the cumulative effect of these rules)? body_y_blanked is one of the 14 uninked non-spacing marks - one for each distinct body - not needed for those with th...

You don't need 280 different glyphs to swap 20 heads and 14 bodies. One could most smoothly do that with 14 uninked non-spacing marks, thus: 1) Contextual substitution: Replace head_x body_y by head_x body_y_blanked 2) For each y, a contextual substitution: Replace head_x body_y_blanked by body_y h...

You may have to populate table composition-function-table, which might take a while to be taken notice of. With the Tai Tham script in Emacs 27, my heart fell when I saw <BA, MEDIAL RA, SIGN E> rendered with the SIGN E rendered on the right with a dotted circle before it, but within a few minutes i...

These mostly aren't hinting issues - the heads can go at the left or the middle of the compound glyph. I think one may need to swap the heads and bodies round - I would do it in GSUB, so I'd be looking at around 280 entries, and make the heads into non-spacing glyphs. Yes, but that assumes you have...

(Also, may I point out that Emacs is a really bad choice of text editor for such fonts… though then again it now uses HarfBuzz, so I guess that makes it a lot easier. I don’t recall how well it worked, the last time I tried using an OpenType font in Emacs.) [EDIT: yes, it’s as terrible as I thought...

The one thing I haven’t worked out yet is the hinting. As you can see, the ⟨w⟩ head tends to stick out into the surrounding glyphs. I think this is because, for Cursive Attachment kerning groups, the shaper is taking the left sidebearing from the first character, and the right sidebearing from the ...

OK, so after some experimentation in FontForge, it seems that adding a ‘curs’ Cursive Attachment lookup works: I can add an exit anchor to the bottom of a consonant, and an entry anchor to the top of a vowel, and the two will connect to each other. (Or should connect to each other; I haven’t tried ...

I know it’s orthogonal: I meant more that auto-hinting makes assumptions about which characters are encoded where. (FreeType does this, at least.) That seems to be an argument for using the PUA, where no assumptions are valid! I’d strongly suggest going with Option 2. Creating hundreds of glyphs is...

I think then ultimately it sort of isn't an abugida or syllabary post-reform. Maybe it's truly an alphabet, with compulsory ligatures on a roughly syllabic scale; but it's disingenuous to describe e.g. the shark glyph as a ligature of ⟨e u⟩ as it has nothing, graphically, in common with either. So ...

Linguistically speaking this is an abugida, though that has no particular relevance for encoding. What's the implicit vowel then? In terms of Daniels' classification, it seems actually to be an alphabet! However, that statement feels a bit odd, rather like saying modern Lao, Mongolian in Phags Pa o...

Oh, I don’t think this is Windows-specific. There’s all sorts of special cases with this stuff. Not to mention font hinting… Unfortunately, it is, or was in Windows 7 days. I remember putting together the rebellious (by rectlinearity) font Da Lekh for the Tai Tham script and totally failing to get ...

Does anyone know how one would make a font for this, btw? I don't know how syllabic fonts work (and have never created a font). The first step is to think about the encoding and whether you want it to work with Window applications. Fortunately (unless you use certain styles of Sanskrit), text on Mi...

alice wrote: ↑Wed Nov 08, 2023 5:00 am Obstruent consonants: an endangered species?

More like several species. Individual ones may be threatened, but the niche will endure.

Possibly a Gallicism. French has several words where the prefix has lost it's meaning, such as réunion 'union'.

And apparently there are Anglic varieties where the more general case of these described here are present, e.g. in Jamaican English. In Jamaican patois (and hence Jamaican English), even before "a" "k" became palatized, like "kyari" for "carry" and "kyan...

In a restricted way the first seems true of many present-day English-speakers, e.g. I for one have [c] for /k/ and [ɟ] for /g/ in many cases before /iː/ and /j/. And apparently there are Anglic varieties where the more general case of these described here are present, e.g. in Jamaican English. An a...