Add Greek small caps
Opened this issue · 7 comments
Gentium has small caps for Latin, Cyrillic and the Greek theta symbol (ϑ, U+03D1), but not for other Greek letters. So, can someone add small caps support for other Greek letters, please?
We've had this request before, and we're considering it for the next major version (v7). One difficulty is that the lowercase > uppercase relationship is much more complex for polytonic Greek than for Latin and Cyrillic, and there are even multiple opinions on how that should work. Up to this point we haven't had the resources to gather the research and apply it to the font. The glyph is the easy part - the OpenType smcp and c2sc features are the challenge.
It would help us if you know of any good online sources that clearly explain how the lowercase > uppercase relationship ought to work (in your opinion). Specifically:
- How should the various diacritical marks be represented?
- What should happen for Unicode characters that have no uppercase equivalent?
I know a online resource about polytonic small caps:
Polytonic Greek: a guide for type designers - https://irenevl.github.io/Polytonic-tutorial/
Just go to the 'Small caps for polytonic set' section (it's on the bottom)
Thank you very much.
That's very helpful! I wasn't aware of that resource. The suggested method of accenting small caps is not one I've ever seen before, and looks very strange at first. I have huge respect for Irene (the author) so I will consider it, but will likely need to hear from others in the polytonic Greek community regarding what they prefer.
If you're wondering what should happen with lowercase letters with no uppercase equivalents, here it is:
- Lowercases with no uppercase equivalents: ᾶ ῆ ῖ ῒ ΐ ῗ ῤ ῦ ῢ ΰ ῧ ῶ ᾷ ῇ ῷ
- Small caps for these letters (font used is Cambria):
If you have more questions, please ask me.
The tutorial mentioned above is offline, but has been archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20220816233341/https://irenevl.github.io/Polytonic-tutorial/
You don't need the Wayback Machine - the tutorial is still on Github, just not as a Github pages site: https://github.com/irenevlachou/Polytonic-tutorial
The change in GH username tripped me off. With the new username one can even find it as GH pages at https://irenevlachou.github.io/Polytonic-tutorial/.