Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#2Very cool use of a technology I wasn't even aware of!
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#3Surprising there isn't a better way to do it than defining 10000 ligature config lines and 10000 glyphs. I guess dynamic combinations of subglyphs are a Unicode level thing?
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#4Surprising there isn't a better way to do it than defining 10000 ligature config lines and 10000 glyphs. I guess dynamic combinations of subglyphs are a Unicode level thing?
https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/FRBCistercian
There is a compositional approach, used by this font.
OP went with brute force because it's probably a heck of a lot easier up front, lol.
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#5Excellent! For a music project of mine I found MusGlyph [1] which is also all about ligatures, like typing ssss for 4 beamed sixteenth notes. There are some ligatures I need that are not in the font, I contacted the author and he encouraged me to add them myself. So now I’m spending quality time with FOSS called FontForge. Also subsetting a ligature-heavy font for the web turns out an interesting challenge. Wrote up my experience here [2]
[1] https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/ [2] https://highperformancewebfonts.com/read/subsetting-and-liga...
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#6This is lovely.
> Sometimes (not always), this makes addition visual
I wonder how often - my suspicion would be rarely.
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#7This is lovely. > Sometimes (not always), this makes addition visual I wonder how often - my suspicion would be rarely.
Seems like it's only when adding 1 + 4, 6, or 8 in a place value or where one of them is 0. It doesn't seem like it'd ever hold across a carry, but I could be missing something.
Edit: There's actually a few cases with adding 2 as well!
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#8Surprising there isn't a better way to do it than defining 10000 ligature config lines and 10000 glyphs. I guess dynamic combinations of subglyphs are a Unicode level thing?
https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/FRBCistercian There is a compositional approach, used by this font. OP went with brute force because it's probably a heck of a lot easier up front, lol.
Nice thanks. I guess this requires manual entry of glyphs, while the other one just works with arabic numerals.
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#9Submitted as a Show HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939312
Re: Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
#10Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems.
The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.