OpenGeofiction
Hey guys,
Big news out of Aludres: We have a writing system for the Everian Language! How exciting!
Anyways, this is a question geared toward those REALLY talented with computers: If I wanted to somehow type my writing system, how could I create the glyphs to do so? I think this is something that could very much help move my country along!
Cheers, Geoboi
Discussion
Comment from gpcf on 18 November 2018 at 22:00
The main problem would be encoding them. You could put them into an unicode private code block and then modify the fonts used by the renderer and website to display the glyphs correctly. This seems however like a huge amount of work, besides being a big hassle, since the glyphs won’t work if you choose a font other than the custom ogf font.
For font creation, you can use fontforge or metafont. I have a little bit of experience with both, meaning mostly that i have made a couple of weird fonts that are really unpractical to use. Metafont has the additional nasty side-effect that your fonts will only work with TeX and will thus have all of TeXs weird features. They will also not be trivially convertible to non-TeX font formats, since Metafont uses quartic splines, while most standard font formats out there only use cubic ones, leaving only cumbersome and quirky conversion methods, like programs that vectorize raster images.
Comment from Luciano on 18 November 2018 at 22:08
Most conlangers will create a custom font to solve this problem. Thus the computer (and keyboard) will “see” the regular ASCII characters, but the display will be whatever your writing system requires.
Example of a free, online font designer (I haven’t used this, so I can’t say how usable it is)
http://www.glyphrstudio.com/
Note that this can’t solve the problem of getting your custom writing to display on the map or in the wiki. It only makes it available on your own computer.
To include the font on the map, that would require creating a custom render (which would include your custom font), and then getting someone (e.g. Thilo) to use that custom render for the OGF server. This might not be feasible. For the wiki, you’d have to include the font in the selection of fonts available to the wiki (i.e. beyond the standard unicode set) - I’m not sure how that would work, but it’s probably possible.
I bypassed this problem for Mahhal by “hijacking” (borrowing) a real-world but not well-known writing system already included in unicode, rather than inventing my own writing system from scratch. User Udilugbuldigu has done something similar, mixing-and-matching various writing systems to create his own. Because we are using unicode elements, we can get them onto the map without any customization of the renderer, e.g. here:
Udi’s work: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=8/-64.567/110.511
My work: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=9/-59.4213/83.9136