From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Sat Sep 27 2008 - 14:54:35 CDT
Even some Latin letters require particular glyph forms to be appropriate
for use in IPA, so certainly one can expect some Greek letters to
require special forms. We regularly get asked to provide both roman and
italic IPA fonts, and in the latter we need to provide IPA-specific
forms of the lowercase a and f that differ from the norms of italic
typography as derived from the cursive manuscript hand. IPA
distinguishes semantically between double- and single-storey a, and
between the descending hooked f and the baseline-terminating f. In
regular typography, these distinctions are purely stylish. Since the
single-storey a and hooked f are typical italic forms, these need to be
overridden in italic IPA style and replaced by double-storey a and
baseline-terminating f.
Recently, we've been asked to make fonts that support both regular
typography and IPA, and to that end arranged with Microsoft to register
the OpenType 'language system' tag <IPPH> for IPA. This allows
pseudo-locale glyph substitution for IPA, although currently limited to
environments that enable hard-coding of OT tags in markup.
These kinds of mechanisms can also be used for Greek characters that
need to assume more Latin-like proportions, ductus and stroke terminals
(serifs) in IPA contexts.
John Hudson
PS. Note that the OT term 'language system' is a misnomer, since what
these tags actually indicate is a particular set of typographic
conventions that may or may not map cleanly to an individual language.
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com You can't build a healthy democracy with people who believe in little green men from Venus. -- Arthur C. Clark
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