[I18NGR] Fwd: Capital Greek accents (was: [Freefont-bugs] Approaching MES-1 compliance)

[Panayotis Katsaloulis]

Ayto to mail hr9e sth lista freefont kai anaferete stis apostaseis
pros ta aristera poy prepei na exoyn ta kefalaia tonoymena grammata.

9a parakaloysa gia sxolia epo toy 9ematos.




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Primoz PETERLIN <primoz.peterlin at biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si>
Date: Dec 9, 2005 12:48 PM
Subject: Capital Greek accents (was: [Freefont-bugs] Approaching MES-1
compliance)
To: Panayotis Katsaloulis <panayotis at panayotis.com>
Cc: freefont-bugs at nongnu.org


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On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Panayotis Katsaloulis wrote:

> From my point of  view, I agree. I could make further optimizations but this
> is not a final release anyway :-) It's a work in progress.

Indeed. An issue with Extended Greek range that I would like to resolve
concerns the bug report #12798:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=12798

Eeli Kaikkonen (even though Savannah counts submitter as "None", it is
most likely him, as he also reported other bugs concerning Greek on the
same day) points out that our Greek letters with breaths and accents have
their diacritical marks (i.e. accents and breaths) overhanging too much to
the left, i.e. into negative values.

This is the way FontForge automatically generates them. I guess that Greek
capital letters with accents and breaths usually occur at the beginning of
a word, which means that the character before it is a space, so they don't
cause too much of crowding or even overlapping. Still, a comparision with
Gentium that Eeli provided
(https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/download.php?item_id=12798&item_file_id=2438)
shows that the typesetting is actually nicer when the inter-word space is
not obstructed by the accents intruding into it.

I have manually corrected FreeSerif.sfd and FreeSans.sfd, i.e. I moved the
glyphs to the right and increased character widths, so no significant
overhang occurs any longer. Still, I would like your comment from the
point of Greek typography - should we move all Greek glyphs with accents
to the right so that the accents are wholly counted in the character
width? Compare, for example, the glyphs in the extended Greek range in
FreeSerif.sfd and FreeSerifBold.sfd to see what I am talking about.

If so, we can perhaps send a bug report to George Williams. I remember he
corrected a similar issue with prosgegrammeni, which stands to the right
of a capital letter: initially, prosgegrammeni overhung past the character
width; now, the character width is increased by the width of
prosgegrammeni sign. Some characters that have been composed years ago
with PfaEdit still exhibit the old uncorrected way.

Yet another issue with Greek accents appears in Free Monospaced family.
There we don't have much space for accent and breath signs left and right
from the letter. Would it be acceptable for a Greek reader if the accent
and breath marks on capital letters would be positioned on top and below
the letter (as they are in the case of small letters) instead of left and
right? This applies to a monospaced font only, of course.

With kind regards,
Primoz

- --
Primož Peterlin,   Inštitut za biofiziko, Med. fakulteta, Univerza v Ljubljani
Lipičeva 2, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija.  primoz.peterlin at biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si
Tel +386-1-5437632, fax +386-1-4315127,  http://biofiz.mf.uni-lj.si/~peterlin/
F8021D69 OpenPGP fingerprint: CB 6F F1 EE D9 67 E0 2F  0B 59 AF 0D 79 56 19 0F

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