[Spellyans] dictionnaire de l'Academie francaise

[Thomas Leigh]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 5:35 AM, Hewitt, Stephen <s.hewitt at unesco.org> wrote:
> 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

I'd respectfully disagree with some of this, based on personal
experience. For a, e, i, o, u with the diacritics you give are part of
the standard Latin-1 character set, and thus no problem. For w and y,
however, only ý and ÿ are part of it. Welsh ŵ and ŷ are in the Latin
Extended-A block in Unicode, and thus available in a large number of
fonts, but there are still far fewer fonts with them than without,
though more and more fonts (at least those produced professionally)
are including this set of characters. The remainder, however — ẃ, ẅ,
ẁ, ỳ — are in the Latin Extended Additional block in Unicode, and are
available in very few fonts indeed. Venture beyond a handful of "core"
fonts such as Times New Roman, Arial, and Verdana and you'll be hard
pressed to find fonts that support Latin Extended Additional (only a
handful, such as EversonMono and Quivira, support it in its entirely;
Times New Roman contains 96 of the 256 characters, according to one
source I just checked). Luckily, of those four characters we're
discussing, ỳ is by far the most readily available, as it is used in
Vietnamese.

All in all, though I like the idea of using ŷ and ỳ for the sake of
consistency, from a practical point of view replacing them with î and
ì makes the most sense.

Regards,

Thomas




> 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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