Re: in search of font for Aleut linguistics

On Sep 19, 5:13 am, Armadillo <re...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Combining linguistics and typography is not easiest thing to do I guess.

Indeed. It's problematic for us that so many far-out glyphs are being
used in so many different languages, although much of the problem
could be solved with proper support of the International Phonetic
Alphabet and combining diacritics. But between the Unicode
Consortium's unwillingness to add the precomposed characters needed
for indigenous American languages and type designers' reluctance to
support combining diacritics (http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/
2005/10/increased_expec_1.html), Americanists are left pretty high and
dry. The positions of both the Unicode consortium and the type
designers are entirely understandable, just unhelpful to us :(

The other issue I have with linguistics and typography is the (IMO)
ugly orthographies linguists have invented for some American
languages. Here in Alaska the guiding principle of the 1970's seems
to have been "use characters anyone can type on a typewriter". Thus
Tsimshian, Haida, Tlingit and maybe others ended up with underlined
letters as accented glyphs and various other atrocities. If the
linguists had consulted with some typographers, maybe the results
would have been a bit more aesthetically pleasing. But I digress...

From commercial fonts I know and which are suitable for good body text the
largest character set is probably in Adobe Minion OT. It does not have all
the characters you mentioned, especially in the beginning of the list. But
it has samall caps and old style figures, etc.

I can send you character set as pdf by email if you want it.

If it's not too much trouble, I would really appreciate it.

I probably would just modify Minion font with FontLab since creating
accented characters from existing glyphs is not that difficult.

I'll look into this approach.


Jukka

PS For the layout InDesign is probably the best choice.

I was planning to use XeLaTeX, mostly because of BibTeX. The thesis
will not be an actual dictionary, but it will include a number of
sample dictionary entries.

Thanks for your help,
Aric

.

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