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

[Michael Everson]

I agree that the N-form, not the n-form capital eng should be the default. It is historically the older form. 

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.

On 7 Nov 2013, at 23:50, Cathy Bow <Cathy.Bow at cdu.edu.au> wrote:

> Dear DejaVu font developers,
>  
> We are developing an online archive of Australian Indigenous language materials at www.cdu.edu.au/laal, using PHP and Bootstrap to interface with a Fez digital repository (a PHP/MySQL web front end to the Fedora Commons Software).
>  
> Some of the metadata requires special characters for Australian Indigenous languages, and we were having particular problems with Ŋ (U+014A) which has two possible realisations (see attached graphic)
>  
> Linguists and teachers in these languages are firm in their desire to maintain the tail-capital-N form in all representations of data from these languages, so using a font which varies between the two representations on different machines is problematic.
>  
> Searching through open source fonts, we came across DejaVu and liked what it offered, except that the Ŋ was displaying the alternate glyph.
>  
> Our developer used fontforge to generate new glyphs for U+014A against the source sfd files from the 2.34 release. He updated the sans-serif font variants, leaving the serif, mono and condensed fonts untouched.
>  
> An example of a record with a number of different special characters in the title (and in the full text) can be seen athttp://laal.cdu.edu.au/record/cdu:33554/info/
>  
> We’re happy with the results and wanted to share it with you. Would you consider including this variant in any future releases? This would be great for our ongoing development, plus we’ll be be able to recommend it to others who need a font to render indigenous languages on the web.
>  
> Warm regards,
>  
> Cathy
>  
>  
> --
> Cathy Bow
> Project Manager
> Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages
> www.cdu.edu.au/laal
> T: +61 8 8946 6876
> 
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Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/