Draft: Armenian Letters (again)

[Logo121]

Reopening of #2552. Accidentally discarded when trying to merge the new commits to the branch.

images

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Things changed since last push:

• Split the characters roughly into groups by their shape.
  • The remnants of the original file is in other.ptl, though that only contains aliases now. To be cleaned up.
• Improved the italic serifs for n/u-shaped letters a little bit: now they follow the motion-serif-like pattern of topleft + bottomright outer serifs.
• Added the currency symbol Dram and the full stop (aliased to colon).
• As hinted by Optimize auto-serif behavior of four characters. #2553, using single-storey g (aliased to bulgarian de) for lower Co.

For the suggested changes:

I think for Ք ք the bottom bar shall be fit in LeftSB-RightSB space.
You could probably place the top edge of ք's bar at baseline. Balance the spaces.

I only moved the right part of the bar (forgot to do so for upper Keh) for now since the left part should extrude out of the stem. Should I also move left stem rightward?

For the second point, doesn't seem to be possible for ultraextended heavy slab, which the bar will overlap with the bottom serif. I moved it to the center at baseline for now.

For Ֆ ֆ maybe we could make the top-left contour horizonally larger (like having the same horizontal size as the bottom-right contour).

Done (but added overshoot for the hook part so that it looks a little bit better).

For Ջ you can maybe make the vertical serif at bottom-left thinner.

Also done (also for Za for consistency).

For Թ we could probably make the outer conour still uase Stroke as stroke width. Only make the inner curl thinner.

Barely.

With normal stroke the space left in the middle is very small, so the inner curl would be really thin to fit in.

It still works in the ultracondensed case for now:

[be5invis]

Can you try typeset some text for sample? Also when you take screenshot you could have higher resolution :)

[Logo121]

Sample text (forgot where I got this):

Նափոլէոն կարդացած է Քորնէյի,
Ռասինի եւ Վոլթերի ստեղծագործութիւնները,
իսկ անոր սիրելի բանաստեղծը Օսսիանն էր։

higher resolution

QP (less polished)

[be5invis]

We may need some extra touching for թ which could make the inner stroke thinner, sort of like its uppercase.
Need some balancing for լ and յ at monospace -- Slightly shift them to left or right if necessary. You can follow the shift number of implementation of l.flatTailed or j.flatHook{Serifless | Serifed}.

[be5invis]

Consolas have some Armenian that you could use as reference:

[Logo121]

We may need some extra touching for թ which could make the inner stroke thinner, sort of like its uppercase.

թ already has the same inner stroke width as the uppercase. Should I make it even thinner?

Need some balancing for լ and յ at monospace -- Slightly shift them to left or right if necessary. You can follow the shift number of implementation of l.flatTailed or j.flatHook{Serifless | Serifed}.

յ is already aliased to dotless j, so i don't think it should have problems.

Changed լ to use LongJut (the same way hookybottom l does).

[Logo121]

image

[be5invis]

Nice, this looks a lot better.
The space between րծ looks a little large.

[be5invis]

I prefer remove move the empty "do"s here.
You can leave comments in letter/armenian.ptl, indicating which letter lives in which file. For example

    * U+0531 Ayb     => letter/armenian/upper-u-group.ptl
    * U+0532 Ben     => letter/armenian/hook-group.ptl

[Logo121]

This whole file is a leftover to be cleaned up anyway, I'll just move all the actual aliases to their corresponding sources and remove this file.

[Logo121]

[be5invis]

I suggest putting these into letter/armenian but create a new file (say, letter/armenian/aliases.ptl).
Similar for other aliases.
(I shall add this part into my refactor plan too...)

[be5invis]

This looks much better :)

[Logo121]

hopefully this doesn't break anything...

[be5invis]

hopefully this doesn't break anything...

I think they are fine.

[Logo121]

Edited changelog, though I suppose the version would probably be bumped.

It's probably ready to be merged, if there are no other problems.

[be5invis]

Edited changelog, though I suppose the version would probably be bumped.

It's probably ready to be merged, if there are no other problems.

Right, at least bump the minor version.
(Actually this change is significant enough for a major version bump.)

[jmcwilliams403]

Using include : refer-glyph 'q' when the original q character is subject to CV features is not good practice. It should instead select its appropriate variants from within latin/lower-q.ptl. Otherwise it will appear as if it were locked to whatever q variant the user compiles their font with by default, which also might not be one you expect here.

[jmcwilliams403]

This should be moved to latin/lower-n.ptl to have more consistent variant behavior. BTW ss17 uses a tailed n under italics which might not be what you want here.
Alternatively it could be remade from scratch to match the other characters in this file.

[Logo121]

Well, if the wiki images for Armenian handwriting is any indication, it's probably fine to have the tail in italic (not that I'm trying to replicate that).

Lower ra is already differentiated by having the n shoulder shift inward.

[Logo121]

Well... yeah, I'm kinda aware of the compatibility problem with variants (see top comment in #2552).

I reckon it will be hard to reliable "link" Armenian letters to some existing character variants, because most characters that share a shape with Latin letters are not actually related to them etymologically(?), and even if we just link by shape, there will be a few characters where the exact character it should link to is ambiguous.

I'd say just merge it as is first (unless there are actual problems where the variant shape would affect the derived character -- I fixed it for q-based ones at least), then handle the variants linking/unlinking later. You can do it as a followup if you want.

[be5invis]

I think we are good enough.