[Spellyans] dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise

[Hewitt, Stephen]

Really unnecessary to install special fonts.

 

Just about all fonts now have (this taken from ordinary Times New Roman:)

 

á é í ó ú ẃ ‎‎ý ‎

à è ì ò ù ẁ ỳ 

â ê î ô û ŵ ŷ 

ä ë ï ö ü ẅ ÿ 

 

The diacritics on a e i o u can be had by using the Spanish keyboard input, as described earlier.

 

For the diacritics on w and y, you can program them in Word as Autotext:

 

Insert / Symbol / select ŷ / Insert. 

Select ŷ in your text / Insert / Autotext / New / Please name your autotext: choose something beginning with a punctuation mark, like ,y / Enter.

Then to get ŷ, type ,y and hit F3.

 

Best,

 

Steve

 

________________________________

From: spellyans-bounces at kernowek.net [mailto:spellyans-bounces at kernowek.net] On Behalf Of Christian Semmens
Sent: Monday, January 31, 2011 11:15 AM
To: Standard Cornish discussion list
Subject: Re: [Spellyans] dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise

 

Hi Michael,

2011/1/30 Michael Everson <everson at evertype.com>

> At this point my relative inexperience may be starting to show, but would it not be possible to remove the diaresis and replace it with a circumflex? The length of the vowel being identified correctly and the function of the diacritic maintained?


The bÿs/bës distinction could be made by writing bŷs/bês. It would not affect the system structurally. However, since ŷ is not in the Latin-1 or the Mac Roman legacy character sets, both PC and Mac users would find many if not most fonts not supporting the character. ÿ on the other hand does not offer this disadvantage. I consider the disadvantage to be very serious indeed. It's one thing to recommend diacritics; it's another to recommend diacritics that aren't supported by people's fonts.

Are you willing to live with that? Options are (1) Mandate ŷ/ê but permit ÿ/ë in fallback and (2) Use ÿ/ë but permit ŷ/ê and (3) Use ÿ/ë as at present.

 


Option 1 would suit me fine. That way the technical deficiencies of some fonts would not drive orthographic design. Surely the Welsh assembly can be tapped for help to make fonts suitable for their own use, which would also be suitable for our own purposes? It might even be possible to lobby the font makers themselves to include the extra character. On Linux, even my terminal font allows the use of ŷ.

I have just trawled through the fonts on Libre Office (Open Office fork) on Ubuntu and attach the file I created that shows that ŷ is well served for fonts under the free office packages. I have attached it below - apologies for those that can only see Microsoft files, a splendid alternative office package with far better file import filters is available for free on all major platforms (Widows, Linux and Mac) at 

http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Although I am sure that publishers will experience sometimes acute problems with font selection, most casual users will have no problem selecting a suitable font for most communications. I haven't tried a Mac yet. 

Regards,
Chris

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