Patch v1: Hangul Syllables in Sans Regular (+ issues)
Greetings,
I come to you today with a preliminary patch for my Hangul Syllables
proposal in DejaVu Sans Regular. It is a huge patch, so I am certain
there are some issues (some of which I already know about, see below)
that will need to be addressed for inclusion into the font.
-- The Contents --
This patch contains 1 new file, scripts/create-korean.py (executable),
which requires the Python FontForge extension to be present. The
script does not run in the makefile, so manual adjustments can be made
to the references in syllables manually, but the ideal thing would be
that the script can make all the syllables without manual adjustments.
This patch modifies src/DejaVuSans.sfd to add 11396 new glyphs, 11172
of which are Hangul Syllables and 224 of which are unencoded jamo
templates used by the script.
The contents of this patch are released into the public domain.
-- Known Issues --
* Curvature issue in template glyphs kor_init_s, kor_init_ss,
kor_init_j, kor_init_ch, kor_fina_s, kor_fina_ss, kor_fina_j and
kor_fina_ch, all variations. I have no idea how those glyphs should be
shaped, and I had to battle FontForge's UI to make the glyphs as they
are now because of point interpolation messing up control points'
coordinates.
* Glyph overlap issues in the syllables. The small dots coming out of
horizontal vowels "combine" with the initial and final consonants; the
horizontal and vertical vowels overlap and combine; and finally, the
vertical vowels combine with initial consonants, creating ambiguous
syllables like U+ACB9 "GYEOB" which looks like it has YAE instead of
YEO as its vertical vowel.
* Weight. I made these glyphs to have the same horizontal and vertical
stems as the rest of the characters in DejaVu, which is horizontal
stems 170 high and vertical stems 203 wide. However, initial and final
'r' and 't' (they look like a squared 2 and an E, respectively)
already show signs that they can't be bolded as much as other
characters already existing in DejaVu Sans Bold. (For example glyphs
showing this problem, see U+B77D..B9C7 and U+D0C1..D30B.)
How should I deal with the weight issue?
a) Reduce the stems in Sans so that the Sans Bold variant can have
double-weight stems without ambiguity in 'r' and 't'.
b) Reduce the bolding factor in Sans Bold just for 'r' and 't' so that
they can be unambiguous instead of appearing as large black squares.
Keep the others' bolding factor constant.
* Optical centering of the vertical vowel. A problem with some of the
vertical vowels is that they have two vertical lines instead of one,
so the alignment on the syllable is thrown off. Perhaps there should
be a separate variant for kor_init when the vertical vowel is wider?
(reducing the width of the initial jamo a bit more) For example glyphs
showing this problem, see U+D330..D33F (Korean Syllables PAE__).
Comments and improvement on the patch are both welcome.
Regards,
- Louis Simard
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