bugFree UCS Outline Fonts - Bugs: bug #51485, U+1FBE GREEK PROSGEGRAMMENI in mono

 
 

bug #51485: U+1FBE GREEK PROSGEGRAMMENI in mono

Submitter:  David Corbett <dscorbett>
Submitted:  Sun 16 Jul 2017 11:07:08 PM UTC
   
 
Category:  individual character(s) Severity:  3 - Normal
Item Group:  glyph(s) incorrect Status:  Fix posted
Privacy:  Public Assigned to:  Stevan_White
Open/Closed:  Open Release:  * development
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Thu 20 Jul 2017 06:08:35 PM UTC, comment #5: 

Hi David,

Of course, I thought you were talking about the capital vowels with prosgegrammeni.  My mind lept to that because those letters had always bugged me.

Now that I re-read the OP, I see that you are only complaining about the shape of the one glyph U+1FBE.  Fair enough, I now fixed that.

I also put in the style set to pick adscript/subscript forms.  Haven't tested it.

Now I'm curious if some of the changes I made would permit this range in bold... really the only thing prohibiting it was glyph width.

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Thu 20 Jul 2017 03:31:10 PM UTC, comment #4: 

I will describe the ideal, then describe how to approximate that in a monospace font.

There are two ways to write the silent iota in Greek. The iota adscript is a normal iota which the reader just has to know is silent. The iota subscript is a hook below the preceding vowel.

Unicode provides both forms. The iota subscript is U+0345 COMBINING GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI. The iota adscript is U+1FBE GREEK PROSGEGRAMMENI. The iota adscript is also U+03B9 GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA: they are canonically equivalent, because they look, behave, and are identical.

One might say that there must be a difference or they wouldn’t both have been encoded. The answer is that ELOT requested a bunch of unnecessary characters which Unicode accepted to effect the merge with ISO 10646. Encoding both was like encoding the Latin ⟨h⟩ twice because French has both h aspiré and h muet.

FreeMono’s glyph for U+1FBE is a spacing low hook. This is, as far as I know, unattested.

So what should it look like? A small iota. It should look and behave 100% identical to U+03B9. One might say that that would obscure the difference between U+0345 and U+1FBE. My response is that the only difference is an artificial artifact of the encoding, not a real difference in the Greek script.

> I mean, one has the options of squishing the glyphs to fit the bounding box, or having them spill out badly.

That is not true. No squishing or spilling is required. In fact, no visual interaction between U+1FBE and the preceding vowel is required. U+1FBE is not a combining character: it stands on its own; in a monospace font, it goes in its own cell.

I’m not talking about characters like U+1FBC GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH PROSGEGRAMMENI, where I agree that the iota adscript would require some unpleasant squishing: I am only referring to the stand-alone U+1FBE.

David Corbett <dscorbett>
Thu 20 Jul 2017 08:47:42 AM UTC, comment #3: 

I mean, one has the options of squishing the glyphs to fit the bounding box, or having them spill out badly.
This isn't the only place in monospace where resolution of these kinds of issues required some ingenuity.

I don't think in ancient Greek, they used capitals as such.  (Early Greek was inscribed with all majiscules, but without "breathing" marks.)  I don't think anything like courier was ever used to print ancient Greek.  We're in new territory here.

Check out bug #39806: Greek iota adscript conventions.

I simply see no way here to put the accent marks to the left and an iota to the right, without severly squashing the letters.  I spent a lot of time trying -- nothing pleased me.  I can stand glyphs that fall a bit out of their bounding boxes, but it has a cost, of course.  Here, whole semantic parts of the glyphs would fall outside.

I know you are rather more a stickler for the forms in the Unicode samples, and while I respect that view, I'm rather less of a stickler. 

My fallback, after finding no way to reflect the ideal glyph, is a clearly- readable and consistent monospace represention of the ideal glyph.  If you have a bright idea, please let me know!

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Mon 17 Jul 2017 12:27:18 PM UTC, comment #2: 

The iota adscript is literally just the letter iota; why would using U+03B9’s glyph be difficult or ridiculous? Is using a spacing subscript glyph for the adscript, as in the latest revision, attested?

David Corbett <dscorbett>
Mon 17 Jul 2017 11:59:14 AM UTC, comment #1: 

I agree that in mono regular the glyph was too far to the right.

Putting a proper postscript form on these letters would be typographically ... difficult, or ridiculous, given the monospace constraint.  This is why the glyph retain the subscript form.

I squished all the glyphs horizontally as far as I'm comfortable with, and they now mostly keep within their bounding boxes.

(There is a progression of badness here: first, extending past the bounding box, then, extending past so far that collision with another letter is likely, then, so far that with clipping the letter might be unrecognizable.)

Steve White <Stevan_White>
Group administrator
Sun 16 Jul 2017 11:07:08 PM UTC, original submission:  

In FreeMono and FreeMono Oblique, U+1FBE GREEK PROSGEGRAMMENI is offset to the right. Also, it looks like an iota subscript (ypogegrammeni) instead of an iota adscript (prosgegrammeni). It should look like U+03B9 GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA, to which it is canonically equivalent.

David Corbett <dscorbett>

 

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    Follow 4 latest changes.

    Date Changed by Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced by
    2017-07-20 Stevan_White StatusProceeding Fix posted
    2017-07-17 Stevan_White StatusNone Proceeding
        Assigned toNone Stevan_White
        SummaryU+1FBE GREEK PROSGEGRAMMENI U+1FBE GREEK PROSGEGRAMMENI in mono

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