bugFree UCS Outline Fonts - Bugs: bug #43756, Gothic: Several letters are...

 
 

bug #43756: Gothic: Several letters are incorrect

Submitter:  Roel <gothicspeaker>
Submitted:  Thu 04 Dec 2014 08:59:20 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  character range Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  glyph(s) incorrect Status:  Fix posted
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  Stevan_White
Open/Closed:  Open Release:  * pre-2005
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Mon 07 Sep 2015 07:19:28 PM UTC, comment #2: 

The letters in serif have been improved for distictness.
Letters from Robert Pfeffer's Gothic font "Skiers" have now been copied in to sans.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Sun 07 Dec 2014 06:41:45 PM UTC, comment #1: 

Hi Roel,

Call me Steve. 

We do not maintain the Debian package.  But the date you gave is impossible.  The gothic range wasn't added to FreeFont until 2008.  The latest version of FreeFont is the one from 2012.

We're all for improving the Gothic range in FreeFont.

As you read in the FreeFont CREDITS file, the glyphs in the Gothic range were taken, with permission, from George Duros' Analecta font.  George does good work.  He explained that he started with scanned images of ancient sources.  The glyphs were imported, regularized and cleaned up.

The letters in the Codex Argentum are very pretty, indeed.

I also see that the letters B, K and R could be more distinct, as they are in both the Unicode code chart (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U10330.pdf), and in the Codex. My guess is that the glyphs were based on particular instances of the letters, which were perhaps not the best examples.

I can improve the individual letters, at least to make them distinct, and more like these examples.  Let's work on this.

As to copying in other fonts -- this is a possible resort, but there may be more to this than you imagine.  First, the other font has to be properly GPL-licensed, or else we have to get permission in writing from the font's creators to GPL license the glyphs.  This process is usually complicated.  Second, the weight and the style of the font should be similar to the existing glyphs in the font (that's my judgment, but I'm pretty picky.)  There is no point in putting glyphs into FreeFont that don't look good with the other glyphs.  (See http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/articles/Why_Unicode_fonts.html)

The Analecta glyphs were the first example of a usable Gothic range we found.  If something else is indeed vastly better in all the above ways, then may consider a replacement.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Thu 04 Dec 2014 08:59:20 PM UTC, original submission:  

Hello GNU.org,

I have posted here earlier, but I was not registered, therefore I made an account.
This is what my Freefont package says:  This package was debianized by Peter Hawkins <peterh@debian.org> on
Fri, 27 Sep 2002 12:42:49 +1000.

I 'm active in a community which tries to revitalize the Gothic language as much as that is possible. We are having one problem though. The current standard unicode for Gothic being used at Linux and several other systems, the Freefont one, is simply not only ugly, but incorrect in some cases and makes reading a Gothic text very difficult. This is one of the reason why I 'm currently translating websites in the Latin script instead, because the Gothic font which is given by this website is a way to discourage people to use a website in Gothic. I will explain the problems, at Memrise the font for Gothic in freefont is saved as image files, I will use those as a reference:

http://static.memrise.com/uploads/things/images/20285985_131016_1606_30.png , I know that it's fun to make the Gothic B look a lot like the Latin one in the gnu freefont gothic, but it's simply incorrect. If you take a look at the Codex Argenteus and read the B, which can be found under the page, the 5th letter, it's clearly diagonal and NOT vertical like this one:  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Wulfila_bibel.jpg/640px-Wulfila_bibel.jpg
The letter D:  http://static.memrise.com/uploads/things/images/20285987_131016_1606_13.png , look at the 5th line, 3rd letter of the Codex Argenteus page, the D is not curly like the freefont one, but it has a straight line from the top to the bottom, not a twist like in the D used in this font.
The biggest problem are the K and the R:
K: http://static.memrise.com/uploads/things/images/20285994_131016_1606_45.png
R: http://static.memrise.com/uploads/things/images/20286002_131016_1609_28.png

I have no problem reading the Codex Argenteus, but a text with this font gives me a lot of problems, because the K and R are so similar that I regularly confuse the two letters, which is why I can't read a text clearly.

I also wonder what those two diagonal lines in the letter U are based on, I can't find them in the Codex Argenteus:

http://static.memrise.com/uploads/things/images/20285999_131016_1608_19.png

An example in the Codex Argenteus of this letter is the the line before the last line, 2nd letter.

My proposal for a solution is to use a different font, there are several good free fonts for Gothic which can be found on the internet, but the most confusing one is choosen here for some reason, which makes reading the Gothic Wikipedia well impossible for me.

Kind regards,

Roel


Roel <gothicspeaker>

 

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    Follow 7 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2015-09-07 Stevan_White StatusProceeding Fix posted
    2014-12-13 Stevan_White StatusConfirmed Proceeding
    2014-12-07 Stevan_White SummarySeveral letters are incorrect Gothic: Several letters are incorrect
    2014-12-07 Stevan_White Categoryoverall font problem character range
        StatusNone Confirmed
        Assigned toNone Stevan_White
    2014-12-04 gothicspeaker Carbon-Copy- Added -email is unavailable-

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