OT Font Question

Devin Asay devin_asay at byu.edu
Tue Sep 30 10:27:54 EDT 2008


On Sep 29, 2008, at 10:31 PM, Mark Swindell wrote:

> Devin,
>
> Thanks for the link.  I'm actually after something that I think may
> not exist.  It would be similar in function to an IPA font, but with
> regular English character pairs whose kerning would be reduced so that
> they would represent a single visual unit, mirroring how they
> represent sound.  "Good" would be "G oo d" and "shallow" would be "sh
> a ll ow."  It would require tweaking the kerning between digraph
> letter pairs and dipthongs to tighten them up, while keeping regular
> spacing between these double letters, single letters, and words.
>
> I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to create, but in teaching I find
> that some children have a difficult time seeing that "sh" for example,
> is not "s h" but rather its own phonetic unit.  (A parallel: until
> fairly recently, "ch" was the fourth letter of the Spanish alphabet,
> though it was never represented with tighter kerning... I think the
> Real Academia might have done away with that one, as well as the "ll",
> at least for purposes of alphabetizing.  (Wikpedia: In 1994, it ruled
> that the Spanish consonants CH (ché) and LL (elle) would hence be
> alphabetized under C and under L, respectively, and not as separate,
> discrete letters, as in the past.)
>
> The idea was to be able to present text to kids written with these
> combinations emphasized while retaining a somewhat natural look.
>

Mark,

Clever idea, but you're probably right--it seems unlikely that someone  
would have created such a specialized font. I guess if I were going to  
do something similar I'd use color or style differences to show the  
letter combinations. Or I supposed you could use Photoshop or some  
other tool that will let you play with the kerning. Of course with PS,  
you're stuck with only the words you create beforehand.

This is a place where the old Mac compressed font style would come in  
handy!

Devin

Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University




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