[Freefont-bugs] IPA glyphs need correction, Serif and Sans

[Denis Jacquerye]

Hi,

I noticed the U+0251 (LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA a.k.a LATIN SMALL
LETTER SCRIPT A) is going to be troublesome in Serif fonts. In
Freefont Serif it looks like the U+0061 (LATIN SMALL LETTER A) from
Serif Italic.
The problem arises when trying to add U+0251 to the Italic font.
U+0061 looks just like U+0251 should be. This is not only problematic
for IPA but also for some African languages, see [1], [2] and [3].
Unicode will add its uppercase character: U+2C6D (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER
ALPHA), see [4].

What should we do? Should we change U+0061 in Serif Italic * so U+0251
can look like the glyph it should be, without having people mixing the
two?

There's another glyph that is problematic. In Freefont Sans, the
U+026A (LATIN SMALL CAPITAL I) is just a reference to U+0131(LATIN
LETTER SMALL DOTLESS I). This is problematic because IPA uses U+026A,
possibly with diacritics. These accented U+026A will look exactly like
accented U+0069 (LATIN LETTER SMALL I), since it looses its dot when
accented. I proposed we simply add serif to U+026A, so people can
differentiate between the the groups of accented glyphs.

[1] http://about.museum/idn/african.latin.html
[2] 
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=LatinWrittenOutNames
[3] 
http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/msg00620.html
[4] http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html
--
Denis Moyogo Jacquerye --- http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~moyogo