A font that can render all language autonyms.
If we want to show a large number of languages written in their own scripts (autonyms), we cannot apply the usual webfonts to it. This is because when each script requires a webfont, we will end up using a large number of webfonts. This can cause large bandwidth usage.
An example of this use case is a language selector on a website.
Autonym font tries to solve this. The font contains glyphs and opentype rules for rendering the language autonyms. And it contains only those glyphs for a language. For example, for Thai, the font has glyphs required for rendering ไทย alone.
The glyphs for the font is taken from a large number of free licensed fonts. See CREDITS file for the full list.
pyftsubset tool from Behdad (https://github.com/behdad/fonttools) helped a lot in the develpment of this font.
Fontforge is used as the font editing program.
See releases Adding a new language autonym to this font
Assuming you know basics of Automake, Fontforge, Opentype rules, Harfbuzz etc. (Sorry, font development is not that easy)
- Identify a font that has the glyphs for the new language autonym.
- Important: The font should have a free license that allows reuse of the glyphs. Don't violate any license. Give proper credits.
- Use pyftsubset to subset the font.
pyftsubset FontName.ttf --text="YourLanguageAutonym"- This will create a new font named FontName.ttf.subset.
- Open the Autonym font using fontforge. Merge the subset font to Autonym font using Element->Merge fonts... option.
- Run make test to test the newly added glyphs.
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. See COPYING file for more information.