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Vietnamese

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I have no experience with typography but wish to modify two fonts so that they will accept all Vietnamese diacritical marks. (Without reverting the vowel to Lucinda Grande.)

Will Type Tool 3 help me do this?

I would like to know before I purchase Type Tool or any other software.

Thank you.
#1 - 2013-04-20, 16:47

I do not use TypeTool but...

Could you be explicit about what you need to do? By "Vietnamese diacritical marks" do you mean some of the Unicode combining marks? If so I notice from the TypeTool description that:
Quote
The ability to edit the advanced typographic OpenType Layout features is not included in TypeTool, so other tools such as FontLab Studio, Microsoft VOLT or Adobe FDK for OpenType need to be used.
and OpenType Layout features would be required to make Unicode combining marks function.
#2 - 2013-05-16, 09:42

Dear Bob,

Thank you for your reply to my question.

To be more clear the attached .doc file shows the diacritical marks used in Vietnamese with some sample Viet in plain old Helvetica. Just for fun you will see the 18 ways to write the word "to" in their language. All of these can be pronounced with sixteen having a meaning.

Some marks are common with French and these are no problem. It is Unicode 0306, 0309, and 0323, which are troublesome. Unicode 031B has been successfully incorporated into my chosen fonts (.ttf) so I do not know why the others are being stubborn.

I did this with "MS Windows 1258 Vietnamese" in the Type Tool demo as shown in the .pdf attachment with all the targets highlighted. It does allow me to work on the desired diacriticals but then not all make to the finish line.

As for the other possible tools Font Lab Studio is rather expensive for the simple task I have; the free Microsoft VOLT does not run on this Mac computer; and Adobe FDK says: "It does not offer tools for designing or editing glyphs."

So, my hopes were for the moderately priced software such as Type Tool to make minor improvements to a few fonts.

Perhaps not.

#3 - 2013-05-17, 00:28
Attachments:

afaict, all of the characters in your documents are available in Unicode as precomposed characters, meaning you don't need to bother with the Unicode combining mark characters (U+0300 block). This also means you don't need to do any OpenType Layout features (GSUB/GPOS) so you don't need VOLT or AFDKO.

You will, however, have to look beyond MS codepage 1258 -- a lot of what you are looking for is in the Latin Extended Additional block starting at U+1E00.

(Someone else will have to answer specific questions about TypeTool and the troubles you have with the demo version -- I'm not a TypeTool user)
#4 - 2013-05-17, 07:00

To give insight into the last comment there:

Although Unicode does provide precomposed characters for most of the letters used in Vietnamese, the default keyboard in Windows DOES NOT generate precomposed characters.

For example, while in French, one uses dead-keys, type in ' then e  and it generates the pre-composed character E WITH ACUTE ACCENT  é   

Vietnamese keyboards by default just output the combining mark in isolation. 
So the keyboard 5, 6, 7, 8 keys generate COMBINING DIACRITIC MARKs which can be entered in isolation, in addition to repeatedly, or after consonants or symbols.

Thus, to properly support Vietnamese input, fonts are expected to support ligatures transforms that map the valid sequences to an optimised precomposed glyph; as well as providing anchors for combining diacritics for applications that cannot handle ligature rendering support.

#5 - 2014-08-05, 14:13

"Thus, to properly support Vietnamese input, fonts are expected to support ligatures transforms that map the valid sequences to an optimised precomposed glyph"

Can you point to any common fonts that do this? I have not heard of any Latin fonts doing this, or needing to do it, for Vietnamese. I've made Vietnamese-supporting fonts (e.g. Hypatia Sans for Adobe). Microsoft's version of Times New Roman does not appear to do it, and surely it would if anybody did?

T
#6 - 2014-08-06, 15:16

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