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

[Denis Jacquerye]

Hi,

According to Michael Everson the U+0251 looks like a Greek alpha in
italic, at least in Finno-Ugric texts.

There's another regular vs italic conflict I noticed. Latin small
letter f U+0066 in italic looks like a Latin small letter f with hook
U+0192.

> > > 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.
> >
> > I am aware of the problem, but I don't know any elegant solution to it at
> > the moment. It is even worse in Sans, where it isn't limited to slanted
> > variant.
> >
> > A similar situation arises in Sans with the U+0261 LATIN SMALL LETTER
> > SCRIPT G, which looks identical like the U+0067 LATIN SMALL LETTER G. In
> > Serif, you don't have any such problems in the upright variant, but in
> > Italic you have the same as with U+0251.
> >
> > It is tempting to blame IPA for choosing typographic variants of existing
> > letters for their symbols, but in the end we will have to deal with the
> > existing situation.
>
> The U+0067 and U+0261 actually makes sense for fonts where the g
> U+0067 has two storey, since the IPA g U+0261must be a script g with a
> single storey below the baseline. I don't know why they didn't apply
> the same logic to a, by adding the required a so U+0061 wouldn't have
> to look like what IPA needs. I guess they didn't consider the usage of
> IPA characters in Italic or stylistic fonts. It is a serious problem
> for the languages actually using the latin script a U+0251. Maybe a
> solution would be to make the script a more like a greek alpha and
> keep the italic a U+0061 as it is. I'll try to get more info on the
> a12n list on how people actually using U+0251, might use it in Italic.
--
Denis Moyogo Jacquerye --- http://home.sus.mcgill.ca/~moyogo