bugFree UCS Outline Fonts - Bugs: bug #49835, Opinion on design of Braille and...

 
 

bug #49835: Opinion on design of Braille and Lisu

Submitter:  David Lasher <dlasher>
Submitted:  Tue 13 Dec 2016 10:10:08 AM UTC
   
 
Category:  character range Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  glyph(s) ugly Status:  Need info
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  Stevan_White
Open/Closed:  Open Release:  * development
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Mon 19 Dec 2016 03:41:33 PM UTC, comment #2: 

The Lisu text sample made in L2/08-019 document is very similar to Arial, which looks conflict with FreeSans. And I think Cyrillic Я in FreeSans is not visually compatible with its design.

Hsing-yen He <hammerandsickle>
Wed 14 Dec 2016 08:39:44 AM UTC, comment #1: 

Hi, David,

This is two bug reports in one.  I can only respond to one of them now.  Hope I emember to get back to this...

The exact style has been changed several times, in response to bug reports and standards information. 

The reason for the solid style is to be a visual representation of how Braille is actually stamped -- the weakness you ention only occurs if a letter appears in isoltaion -- as in real Braille.

We did in fact experiment to make the dots more visibly readable. Note that at very small font sizes, the exact hardware used to display a glyph and the rendering software have a big influence. Did you compare the fonts on different machines, and different OSs?  I doubt there is a general solution to all point sizes on all displays on all systems.  Printed at 300dpi, it looks pretty good to me.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Tue 13 Dec 2016 10:10:08 AM UTC, original submission:  

I have some thoughts about improving the designs of a couple of blocks. These are just my opinions, not something that is definitely wrong.

Braille: (see attached picture)
The problem with using empty dots (Free Mono) is that one-column dot patterns are confusable with each other. The problem with open circles (Free Serif) is that — especially at small sizes — the open circles may not be clearly distinguishable from the filled dots.
I rather like the style used by the Quivira font, which uses much smaller dots for the blank spaces. It is always clear which of the dots in the grid are "on" and "off". The trick seems to be to choose the smallest dot size that does not disappear at text sizes.

Lisu:
The issue here is with the letters based on G and R. Free Sans uses Helvetica-style letters, with a foot on the G and a curved vertical leg on the R. These features look fussy to me in the inverted letters.
In my opinion a footless G and a straight-diagonal-leg R would look better for Lisu, especially for the inverted letters. Most of the samples shown in http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08019-lisu.pdf have these simpler forms.
(Note that you already have a glyph for the straight-leg R, in the Cyrillic Я)

David Lasher <dlasher>

 

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Attached Files
file #39212:  Braille.png added by dlasher (3KiB - image/png)

 

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    Follow 4 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2016-12-14 Stevan_White Item GroupNone glyph(s) ugly
        StatusNone Need info
        Assigned toNone Stevan_White
    2016-12-13 dlasher Attached File- Added Braille.png, #39212

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