[Spellyans] dictionnaire de l'Académie française

[Michael Everson]

On 31 Jan 2011, at 10:15, Christian Semmens wrote:

>> 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.

An interesting view. 

> 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?

I don't beleive so... I'm talking about TENS OF THOUSANDS of fonts. Not two dozen popular fonts. Not 17 "web-safe fonts". I mean artistic display fonts, and Gothic fonts, and the whole range of serif and sans-serif fonts.  

> 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.

Yes, your terminal font does. But does the font that I used on the front cover of Alys in Pow an Anethow or Adro dhe'n Bÿs in Peswar Ugans Dëdh support it? (The answer is no, neither one did.)

Surely you do not wish to leave it to me to write individually to a thousand font developers in order to make sure that they support 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

That's 95 fonts. 

> 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. 

Please go to http://myfonts.com and count the fonts. There are more than 2500. 

Cornish users should not be limited by "most casual uses".

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/