What are difficulties linguists have run into with common fonts?

Question

Recently I've resumed work on a font I'm currently developing, meant to be released as a completely free, open-source, OFL-licensed font designed specifically for use in academic and formal writing.

Besides being free and open source, it aims to have exceptional symbol coverage among many different languages (in particular supporting Latin-based scripts, Greek, and Cyrillic-based scripts), as well as coming with optical sizes, which can be thought of as extra families of the font designed specifically for certain sizes, like for footnotes or book covers.

Currently the regular style of the font looks like this (please ignore the currently defective spacing at certain parts):

I have a few plans to better support linguistics in relation to the design of the font:

• First, I plan to add extensive support for phonetic notation, including in particular the IPA, but also the extIPA and Americanist phonetic notation.

• I plan to follow the example of established phonetic fonts while designing everything, aiming for the best design possible, such as discussed here.

• I plan to support a really wide array of languages, from largely used languages such as Spanish, German, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, etc. all the way to low-resource African languages like Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, low-resource languages using the Cyrillic scripts such as Abkhaz and Mari, etc.

  Part of the reason for this, at least when it comes to linguistics, is to facilitate the writing of articles in the phonetics/phonology/structure/etc. of those languages, allowing for a unified font to be used in writing, and dispensing with the need to use multiple fonts due to lack of glyph support.

However, not being a working linguist myself, it is evident to me that I significantly lack the actual experience to be able to effectively identify most of the issues that might come up in actual practice. To this end, I would like to ask:

Question. What are difficulties linguists have run into while working with commonly used fonts in their works?

What should I focus on to be able to best design a font that will amply satisfy the needs of working linguists, based on the issues they have encountered in their work and research experience?

Answer 1

This sounds like an excellent project. I hope you succeed and look forward to seeing the end product! These are some of the main requirements for my particular field of linguistics, Indo-European studies. For more general/theoretical branches of linguistics, there will be other needs related to formulas, syntax trees, etc.

My current job consists in large part of typesetting and laying out academic books (not only Indo-Europeanist ones, but within the humanities), and there are a few very frequent and very frustrating shortcomings that I face over and over again.

Aside from a solid support of IPA, which it seems you’ve already pretty much got covered, much of what I typeset requires the font to support:

• characters used to transcribe Indo-Europeanist things (and various other commonly found transliterations), such as velars with inverted breves ⟨k̑ g̑⟩, vowels with inverted underbreves ⟨i̯ u̯⟩, vowels with macron + breve ⟨ā̆ ē̆ ō̆ ū̆ ȳ̆…⟩ macron + accent ⟨ā́ ḗ ī́ ṓ ū́…⟩
  ** [Notice how, at least on macOS, the fallback font in the browser paints the macron and acute over the e differently to the others since ḗ is the only one that exists as a precomposed character]
• advanced Ancient Greek, including accents and breathing marks, historical letters (qoppa, sampi, etc.), alternative letter forms (like ⟨ϑ⟩ for theta), etc.
• advanced Cyrillic, including historical variants
• OpenType caps features (caps, smcp and c2sc) for all of the above, including in bold and italic styles

Just these four requirements, especially the final one, whittle the currently available options down to just two or three fonts, of which one is a modified version of Minion commissioned especially for Indo-Europeanist use and not publicly available; and another was commissioned and published by another publisher of linguistic works who have stipulated that it may not be used by competing publishers.

In addition to these requirements, various others occasionally pop up, such as support for Mycenaean Greek, Linear A/B, various obscure manuscript ligatures, Tocharian (not yet encoded in Unicode), etc. However, these are so obscure that I would not expect a generally linguistics-oriented font to support them; there are specialist fonts for them.

---

Ideally, a linguistics-oriented font should also support Devanagari, CJK, Arabic and pretty much any other script you can think of, to ensure consistent line height, letter size and stroke width across scripts. In your sample image, for example, the kana look like they’re from a different font that doesn’t fit with the rest of the text very well (no serifs and different stroke width, line height and letter size).

But supporting a world of scripts is a massive task and not doable by a single person – Google’s Noto font suite were made by hundreds of people over several years and are still far from complete.

Answer 2

First of all, your font looks already really good in the main roman typeface and has good distinctive features.

In the support of West African orthographies the design of italics becomes a bit tricky because of the letters F with hook (uppercase Ƒ, lowercase: ƒ) and V with hook (Upper case Ʋ, minuscule: ʋ). A way to deal with this is carefully choosing the shapes of italics for f, v, and subsequently also w, see Knappen 1993. Fonts for Africa: The fc fonts. TUGboat 14, 104–106. Another problem is the letter Eng or Engma (capital: Ŋ, lowercase: ŋ) which has several different shapes for the capital letter and communities may have strong feelings which of the shapes looks right, but unfortunately they don't agree (see, e.g., this mail message by Lorna Priest from SIL).

There are probably other possible pitfalls, one that comes to my mind is the Esperanto lowercase letter ĥo: It is better to place the hat to the right of the main stem than directly above it.

P.S. The documentation of the TIPA package for LaTeX by Fukui Rei 2002 is also an excellent source of information and inspiration.

Answer 3

I am not a working linguist, but have often needed to use linguistic notation in things that I am writng. As Janus Bahs Jacquet mentioned, good coverage of letters with diacritics, including ones that are not precomposed characters, is helpful. I have noticed that some fonts do not position the breve correctly when a vowel with a macron and breve is italicized, e.g. on my computer, ē̆ shows up on one browser with the ˘ slightly too far to the left, and on another with it much too far to the right:

Taking care of details like this will surely be appreciated.