Search found 1384 matches

by Richard W
Mon Nov 13, 2023 3:11 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 5:51 pm
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 7:51 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 6:58 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Emacs and complex scripts

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...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 5:47 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 5:12 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Emacs and complex scripts

(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...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 4:18 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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 ...
by Richard W
Sun Nov 12, 2023 3:47 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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 ...
by Richard W
Sat Nov 11, 2023 6:04 pm
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Sat Nov 11, 2023 9:42 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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 ...
by Richard W
Sat Nov 11, 2023 9:13 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Sat Nov 11, 2023 8:49 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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 ...
by Richard W
Fri Nov 10, 2023 11:32 pm
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Sego
Replies: 55
Views: 9892

Re: Sego

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...
by Richard W
Wed Nov 08, 2023 3:52 pm
Forum: Languages
Topic: Language change in real time
Replies: 34
Views: 8835

Re: Language change in real time

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.
by Richard W
Sat Nov 04, 2023 6:15 pm
Forum: Ephemera
Topic: Great Unsolved Mysteries of Lingustic Terminology #416
Replies: 5
Views: 1270

Re: Great Unsolved Mysteries of Lingustic Terminology #416

Possibly a Gallicism. French has several words where the prefix has lost it's meaning, such as réunion 'union'.
by Richard W
Sun Oct 22, 2023 4:18 pm
Forum: Languages
Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
Replies: 4676
Views: 2058384

Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread

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...
by Richard W
Sat Oct 21, 2023 10:45 pm
Forum: Languages
Topic: Linguistic Miscellany Thread
Replies: 4676
Views: 2058384

Re: Linguistic Miscellany Thread

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...
by Richard W
Sat Oct 21, 2023 8:40 am
Forum: Conlangery
Topic: Conlang Random Thread
Replies: 2956
Views: 2847406

Re: Conlang Random Thread

If I have understood the use of the Latin gerundive correctly, it is an adjective which pretty much corresponds to the gerund of a verb. I would say that the correspondence is overwhelmingly one of form. The only semantic relationship I'm aware of is in phrases like that meaning 'to seek peace', wh...
by Richard W
Sat Oct 14, 2023 3:36 am
Forum: Ephemera
Topic: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
Replies: 710
Views: 136672

Re: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

It's not a matter of the function being "conceptually problematic", you're just wanting it to be something it isn't. That's a good summary of the problem - the 'function' isn't what one wants it to be, especially with non-positive bases. In particular, it doesn't satisfy the 'Maths 101' d...
by Richard W
Fri Oct 13, 2023 4:18 pm
Forum: Ephemera
Topic: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers
Replies: 710
Views: 136672

Re: AIs gunning for our precious freelancers

KathTheDragon wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2023 8:26 am You could have the branch cuts at τn + 1 radians, or τn + 2.674 radians, or anywhere you like.
I note that you yourself are preferring straight line cuts! That's not what you used for your real-domain 'counterexample'.