Expansion: IPA and Combining Diacritcals to cover more Latin-based African languages
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
fonts-ubuntu (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Wishlist
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Many characters used in African languages orthographies a currently missing from the Ubuntu font family.
Some are actually present in uppercase, for example Ɛ U+0190 is present but ɛ U+025B is missing.
Combining diacritics (U+0300, etc. and U+1DC4...1DC7) are also needed as many African languages use them.
For the combining diacritics, OpenType GPOS features need to be added for correct positioning.
Examples:
ɛ U+025B and ɔ U+0254 are used in the official alphabets of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Tchad, and Cameroon, as well as other alphabets.
U+300 is used in the Pan-Nigerian alphabet (in Yoruba ẹ́ is used), or in any language using accented characters not in Unicode as precomposed form.
The ANLoc (African localisation) project has a list of characters uses in orthographies of African languages :
http://
and a list of accented characters (not available as precomposed characters, i.e. using combining diacritics)
http://
affects: | ubuntu-font-family → fonts-ubuntu (Ubuntu) |
Changed in fonts-ubuntu (Ubuntu): | |
milestone: | later → none |
status: | Incomplete → Confirmed |
This bug is quite broad and so quite hard to deal with, of course the desire of the big (support for everything ever) is laudable, but to actual make that happen we'll have to break it down and tackle it in much smaller bite-size chunks.
From an end-users' point of view, the desire will be to add the glyphs that a particular script/language requires, but from an implementors' viewpoint, Dalton Maag have a preference for ensuring that whole Unicode blocks are included in one go in order to ensure harmony across the typeface.
I'll go through the codepoints that you've specifically raised and the blocks that they are in. Currently the UFF includes Latin A+B not some of the other blocks:
Ɛ (U+0190), Latin Extended B: done
ɔ, ɛ (U+0254, U+025B), IPA Extensions
x̀..xͯ (U+0300..U+036F), Combining Diacritical Marks
x᷄..x᷇ (U+1DC4..U+1DC7), Combining Diacritical Marks Supplemental
Gaining coverage by way of doing full-blocks means:
IPA Extensions: 95 glyphs, ~45 straight composites of existing Latin/Greek
Combining Diacritical Marks: 111 glyphs, ~100 straight composites, placement work
Combining Diacritical Marks Supplemental: 43 glyphs
For the latter, 36 codepoints are already grabbed by the Ubuntu Font Family (drawn as the unknown numbered square glyph), but do not appear to have a glyph associated. See the coverage map from Unicode for these:
http:// unicode. org/charts/ PDF/U1DC0. pdf