/orthic-sans-fira-abandoned

Mozilla's new typeface, used in Firefox OS

Primary LanguageCSSOtherNOASSERTION

Orthic Sans

Orthic Sans is a fork of Mozilla Fira. It aims to provide a font using the Orthographic Cursive alphabet for the core English alphabet focusing on the fully-written style. (No -ing, though the hooked -ks is probably doable.)

ABANDONED

This has been abandoned.

Building atop an existing font was a bad move:

  • It's overwhelming for me as a novice
  • I can't really reuse a ton of its "DNA" very well, due to the peculiar needs of the target script

So I've abandoned this in favor of building something small and functional, though almost certainly uglier than what a proper type designer would come up with, from scratch.

Why?

Simply: Orthic reading practice.

The main way to master reading a new alphabet is to read text in that new alphabet.

If a computer can set texts in Orthic, then it's easy to generate reading material, though perhaps awkard.

But if a font can do this rather than some out-of-band custom "text drawing" software, students of the system can practice as a part of their everyday computer usage within the apps they're using already.

What's Changed from Fira

  • A through Z, both uppercase and lowercase, now use Orthic letters.
  • Some punctuation that can be confused for Orthic letters, like dashes and maybe parentheses, has been disambiguated by a cross-tick.

What's Tricky

The primary technical challenge lies in sorting out cursive attachment and the several ligatures required:

  • ch
  • sp, ps, nsp, ph, phth
  • th and word-final th
  • dw, tw, wn, wm, wk
  • wr, wh, word-final ws, initial w, medial and final w
  • sw, sh, sr
  • rce
  • xh, xp, xt
  • hooked ks
  • all doubled letters, which should be a single letter with a dot below instead, except for EE/EI/IE, which is its own letter
  • adjacent opposite-direction curves ([mn][td] and [td][mn]), which run together (e.g., "mt" does not go below the baseline).
  • diphthongs, which depend on the preceding and sometimes following letter for their shape

What's Changed from Textbook Orthic

Making Orthic fit for more than context-rich English text requires:

  • systematically distinguishing uppercase and lowercase letters (is it customerId or customerID?)
    • perhaps a cross-mark? (this is nearest in spirit to the way handwritten Orthic indicates proper names)
    • perhaps double-stroking/outlining the letter, like \mathbb?
    • perhaps an over-dot? (though that would be "fun" with diacritics)
  • making R vs L vs H vs CH easy to tell apart, even in isolation (is it "h. 1" or "ch. 1"?)
  • distinguishing qu vs Qu vs qU vs QU vs just q/Q
    • we'll cross this bridge when we come to it. to start, we may just depart from Orthic and use the qu character for just q.
  • distinguishing i from e, without having to sweat the following characters overmuch
    • perhaps an above-dot rather than an in-line-with-the-tick dot?
    • perhaps an "embedded" dot at the end of the uptick for I?

Roadmap

  • Forked from Fira: 2020-01-30
  • Get Medium usable
    • Without cursive attachment or ligatures
    • With ligatures
    • With cursive attachment
  • Get Mono usable
  • Maybe go back for Italics.

Why build on Fira?

  • It's open source.
  • It has both sans and mono flavors, so it's usable in both IDE and Terminal.
  • I like the way it looks.

Other options would be Iosevka or Noto, though Noto doesn't seem to actually have the source public yet.

Why fork the unmaintained Mozilla repo?