[DejaVu-fonts] New glyph for U+014A

[Cathy B. <Cat...@cd...>]

Dear DejaVu font developers,

We are developing an online archive of Australian Indigenous language materials at www.cdu.edu.au/laal<http://www.cdu.edu.au/laal>, using PHP and Bootstrap to interface with a Fez digital repository (a PHP/MySQL web front end to the Fedora Commons Software).

Some of the metadata requires special characters for Australian Indigenous languages, and we were having particular problems with Ŋ (U+014A) which has two possible realisations (see attached graphic)

Linguists and teachers in these languages are firm in their desire to maintain the tail-capital-N form in all representations of data from these languages, so using a font which varies between the two representations on different machines is problematic.

Searching through open source fonts, we came across DejaVu and liked what it offered, except that the Ŋ was displaying the alternate glyph.

Our developer used fontforge to generate new glyphs for U+014A against the source sfd files from the 2.34 release. He updated the sans-serif font variants, leaving the serif, mono and condensed fonts untouched.

An example of a record with a number of different special characters in the title (and in the full text) can be seen at http://laal.cdu.edu.au/record/cdu:33554/info/

We’re happy with the results and wanted to share it with you. Would you consider including this variant in any future releases? This would be great for our ongoing development, plus we’ll be be able to recommend it to others who need a font to render indigenous languages on the web.

Warm regards,

Cathy


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Cathy Bow
Project Manager
Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages
www.cdu.edu.au/laal
T: +61 8 8946 6876

CHARLES DARWIN UNIVERSITY
Darwin, Northern Territory 0909 AUSTRALIA
CRICOS Provider No. 00300K | RTO Provider No. 0373

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