[Eng] [DejaVu-fonts] New glyph for U+014A

[Victor Gaultney]

On Fri Nov  8 08:53:17 2013, Michael Everson wrote:
> The problem is that we ought to have disunified the two engs long ago, by adding a new AFRICAN ENG since it is some African languages which prefer the n-form capital. But our colleagues in SIL did not want to do this, and our colleagues in Samiland maintain that they have too much data using the current code point to change.

There is no good solution to this problem. Disunification at this point 
would either cause a data-migration headache for Samiland (and 
potentially Australia), or seriously cripple development and education 
in Africa and parts of Papua (where they do not have the resources 
Norway and Australia have).

The only good long-term strategy IMHO is to press even harder for all 
apps to support language-specific rendering using 
OpenType/AAT/Graphite. Then individual language communities can express 
their preference as to their preferred forms. (BTW - there are not only 
two forms of the capital eng in use. There are at least three in common 
use, and I've seen a fourth used for a language in Ghana.)

I'd suggest that the way forward for the DejaVu project is to

1) leave the large-small-eng as the default, but add language-specific 
rendering tables to switch the forms, which will encourage 
app-developers to support them
2) consider adding region-specific subsets to the project, as we've 
begun to do with some of our fonts, see:

http://scripts.sil.org/FontSubsets

In the 'Extras' folder of that package we include the raw data on the 
character support inventory for our subsets.

An Asia-Pacific subset of DejaVu would meet the Australian need very 
well and could use the tall-capital-eng form (as we do for that 
subset). It would also have the further benefit of being dramatically 
smaller and more useable as a web font.

Victor Gaultney
SIL International