User:Ben Laenen
From DejaVu
I discovered DejaVu when I was looking for a Bitstream Vera-like font that had the letter ř. The reason? Well, maybe a strange one, but there was a song in my music collection from Antonín Dvořák, and it always displayed this irritating box. So a bit of googling pointed me to DejaVu. So I was happy, until I noticed that Greek characters were still replaced by Verdana (yep, there are some Greek songs in my collection as well, but it was also a period before I went to Greece and I was learning some basic modern Greek, so that can count as the main reason, and the Greek language has always fascinated me since I started learning classical Greek in high school). So that was the point where I started to experiment with FontForge. And it was such fun that I decided to join this project. That was in August 2005.
So now I'm still here, so I must really like this font developping... The Greek support is finally complete, including Greek Extended. Some modifications still have to be done though. I also went beyond Greek: Armenian and Arabic in Sans, somehow I decided that making new alphabets is something I like. So that's probably what I'm working on in future.
Contents |
Work in progress
In progress
This list contains the things that I'm working on now:
- hinting of various glyphs
- add Arabic to Sans: I have no idea why I chose to do this, probably because I think it is a beautiful script. It's a huge task, so I have no idea how this will end, but right now it seems to go quite nicely. I think this probably includes about 1000 glyphs (about 500 if you don't count 2 and 3-letter ligatures in presentation forms A) so it's a long term project...
Work-pipeline
This list contains the things in the order as they are on my todo-list:
- Arabic in Sans
- make better breathing marks for Greek
- maybe reshape nu and chi in Serif
- combining glyphs for Greek (if they aren't done when I get at this item)
Finished
- Greek Block (excluding Coptic characters) in all faces
- Greek Extended Block in all faces
- Armenian Block in Sans
- support for basic Arabic in Sans
Other Notes
Arabic
These are the steps that are needed for Arabic support:
- basic glyphs U+0621 - U+064A (committed)
- Arabic Presentation Forms B (committed)
- define substitutions for basic glyphs (this is where the magic happens: letters will now be written attached to each other) (committed)
- other glyphs in main Arabic block (for other dialects like Persian; combining diacritics; numbers) (numbers committed, other glyphs partially committed an partially work in progress)
- Arabic supplement
- Arabic Presentation Forms A U+FB50 - U+FBE9 and substitution definitions for these glyphs in main Arabic block (partially committed)
- make contextual forms of glyphs that aren't in presentation forms tables outside unicode
- complete Arabic Presentation Forms A (I think this is not really necessary: these are just letters attached to each other; they can be written very differently though, like one glyph on top of another, but this isn't necessary, allthough it's prettier in many cases of course; I still have to decide what to do about this)
Variations for glyphs that will have to be implemented (if you know other things, please let me know, it's difficult to find these things):
- Urdu has different numbers 4 (U+06F4), 6 (U+06F6) and 7 (U+06F7) (compared to the Eastern Arabic ones as seen in Unicode tables)
- Sindhi has also different numbers 6 and 7
- meem (U+0645) has tail that goes horizontal in Sindhi
- heh (U+0647) has different shapes in Sindhi and in Urdu
- U+06DD and U+06DE combine with small versions of numbers (also small European numbers?)
Maybe after Arabic list
Here are some things that I maybe will do after I finished Arabic (some were requested on the mailing list) -- small print: I'm not saying that I will do the things in this list, but that it is a possibility
- Cherokee
- Coptic
