Almost made working Ol Onal

[Mercury13]

Right now I’m fixing bearings before making digits. First make them work, then apply to digits of firm width.
And IDK for now where to take danda from.

Again, single style, metrically Noto compatible, made in FontForge. Everything’s (almost) done with bearings, no kerning just because of Ol Onal’s nature.

[simoncozens]

Very nice - I can set you up a repo, would you make a PR?

[Mercury13]

OK

[Mercury13]

Need digits, find danda somewhere (or draw for myself) and tweak with E7 Ur a bit.

[Mercury13]

What’s next? Gurung? Cannot imagine serif style, and IDK whether I can build tables (glyph reordering is cool when OS knows the script, like it was with Makasar, but big pain when does not). Tulu? Really-really hard. Garay? Maybe.

[Mercury13]

Sunuwar? So strange that I cannot even think how to write it. Kirat? Done by SIL, that’s all.

[Mercury13]

Rationale.

1. Backslash quill is common in all Indic scripts, Brahmic and alphabetical. I played with it in e.g. Q-like letter (DB Aw).
2. Inverse contrast is also common. As Ol Onal is a really small script, it’s routinely repeated in e.g. Devanagari that’s more compact (IDK whether Devanagari is Bhumij or other local language). They mechanically compress fonts and get… you get point.
3. I draw Noto’s drop everywhere curved thick line starts rather than ends. Just draw the letter with quill dipped into ink, or a really poor ballpoint — there were in 90s, I did not see such very-very long, and ≈2000 I wrote lectures with a rather good pen. (There were LOTS of bad copybooks, but that’s another thing.)

[Mercury13]

4. As Ol Onal is a script w/o printed tradition, I was inspired with handwritten specimen. This approach proved good in Todhri, and I was probably right, SIL did the same with Kirat.
5. I wanted to make glottal-8 smaller than normal letter, and I checked whether it’s possible.
6. Position of umlauts in printed text is strange because of poor fontmaker’s skills and ASCII mapping. Handwritten text often draws them in more natural places.

[Mercury13]

Made some digits (it was really hard), now nuancing everything. Only D8 is remade now, next tasks: check strokes of W-like letters, check whether you need to thin straight horizontal lines to 90.

[Mercury13]

This is a Gurung test, but cannot invent appropriate metrics. Hope I’ll make glyph reordering.

[Mercury13]

Better, but cannot squeeze rare UU+anusvara. Did not even think about left umlauts. For about a week did nothing.

[Mercury13]

Squeezed anusvara in such a fashion.

[Mercury13]

Gurung’s headline position is 625, taken from similar script (Sharada). Though lines are thinner than in Sharada.

[Mercury13]

Current Gurung anusvara is based on handwritten tradition: tick when there’s no circle, and smile when there is.

[simoncozens]

Created ol-onal and gurung-khema repositories. Please push your development sources (FontForge etc.) to the sources/ directory and I will make the build chain work.

[Mercury13]

@simoncozens It’s better to wait for Gurung, right now the font is workaround on workaround. Ol Onal isn’t completely done, maybe tonight. But please make Todhri, it’s waiting!

[Mercury13]

(Ol Onal still needs a little bit nuancing, especially in 1, 7 and W-like letter.)

[simoncozens]

I don't expect them to be finished, but having the sources in repos would be nice. Will make a repo for tohdri.

[Mercury13]

Okay, I’ll remake Gurung digits (made them too narrow) and drop too!

[simoncozens]

Todhri is done. Push to Ol Onal please?

[Mercury13]

Thank you. I’ll improve a bit and push.

[simoncozens]

Hey @Mercury13 thanks again for your work - any updates for me?

[Mercury13]

Gukh done, I’ll drop. Onao — IDK, maybe too.

[Mercury13]

Gukh dropped.