Requests for features

[ischaap]

May I request some additions for a future build?

Request 1. It would be very useful to me if, like Brill, Junicode Two offered variant forms of capital and small capital eng. Below, left to right, are Brill's default capital eng, capital variant 1, capital variant 2, default small cap eng, small cap variant 1, small cap variant 2, and lowercase.

Would it be possible to add the two variants to Junicode Two in capital, small cap, and petite cap? It would be much appreciated.

Request 2. Support for two characters often used in dictionary transcriptions: Latin small capital letter i with stroke U+1D7B and Latin small letter upsilon with stroke U+1D7F. This one is less critical for me because I can easily fake these using strikethrough, but nevertheless would be much appreciated.

Request 3. An anchor below for modifier letter small u U+1D58, modifier letter small schwa U+1D4A, and modifier letter small w U+02B7, as well as an anchor above for modifier letter small j U+02B2. Examples below are from Gentium Plus.

The modifier u with breve is used in older works on Indo-European; the others are useful in transcribing various evanescent offglides. Again, these can be fairly easily faked (with the exception of the j with ring above), but again would be much appreciated.

I understand that you want to limit additions to Junicode Two as much as possible, but I would make ready use of all these. But considering that some of them are fairly easily faked, I'd say the most critical for my purposes would be the variant engs and anchor above for modifier j, which are less easy to fake. At any rate, many thanks for considering these!

[psb1558]

The anchors for mod u, schwa, w, were so easy that I went ahead and did them. So were U+1D7B and U+1D7F. The others can wait a little while.

[ischaap]

Terrific, thank you @psb1558!

[psb1558]

New capital forms of Eng:

Comment, please. Small cap and petite cap versions will be generated (more or less) automatically from these.

I'm not sure yet how these will be accessed.

[ischaap]

Thank you for working on these. My only suggestion is that, as capitals, I think it would be better if the top left serif matched the one on the other capital letters -- whereas I'd expect the more wedge-shaped serif only on a lowercase form (the following are Junicode Medium).

Re: access, I'm not sure what will work best in Junicode, but in Brill, each one is a different stylistic set of capital eng.

[psb1558]

I can't use stylistic sets for this: there aren't enough left, and anyway, this isn't what they're for. I've got a couple of character variant features still unused, but if you have to use MS Word, these won't help you.

Are these language-specific, i.e. language a uses one, language b another, etc.? If so, we could hook them to the currently active language, the way Junicode does with thorn and eth. Otherwise, it'll have to be a character variant. (But they will also be available via Junicode's tag system, and that does work in MS Word, though there's a learning curve.)

I'll think about the serifs. Problem is, Junicode has a wedge-shaped serif for other capitals that require that the top serif be one-sided, e.g. insular R:

and consistency is an important consideration in a font.

[ischaap]

Ah I see -- I'll leave the question of serifs to your good judgement.

To my knowledge, these eng variants aren't associated with particular language, but I have seen them used in phonological contexts, perhaps to represent different qualities of velar nasal (as a small/petite cap). There may be other uses that I'm not aware of, though.

I did recently experiment successfully with Junicode's character tag system (very nifty), so if that's the best way to access these in Word, that sounds good. It's nice to have Word as a working backup for times when you don't need to use something more robust.

[kenmcd]

@psb1558 I have seen these localized, so that may also be an option.
(have probably saved the feature code somewhere)

@ischaap What language are you using these for?

[psb1558]

I've got a couple of character variant features available—cv91 and cv99. I can use one of those—I'll say cv91.

It's a bit of an odd situation that there are variants for uppercase eng but no variants for the lowercase letter. For letters with normal casing pairs, c2sc produces a small cap from a capital, smcp produces a small cap from a lowercase letter, and pcap produces a petite cap from a lowercase letter. Junicode doesn't use c2pc, the petite cap equivalent of c2sc. I suppose I'll have to add it—otherwise there won't be any sensible way to get the two petite cap variants. So you'll have to apply either one or two features to the "plain" capital Eng:

• cv91 with index 1 or 2 to get the variant capital; and, if you like,
• c2sc for a small cap version, or
• c2pc for a petite cap version.

[psb1558]

On top: U+014A + cv91[1] + c2sc or c2pc.

On the bottom: U+014A + cv91[2] + c2sc or c2pc.

The italic shapes are pretty predictable, so I won't bother to illustrate them. BTW, Junicode didn't have a petite cap version of default eng/Eng, so I've added that.

[ischaap]

Brilliant, thank you. Will test in InDesign when the new build shows up. Also in Word, assuming the manual will be updated with character tags for these.

[psb1558]

I'll probably post version 2.002 sometime tomorrow.

[ischaap]

@psb1558 thank you very much for adding the capital eng variants in 2.002. I tested them in Word using the character tag system and was able to achieve both variants. Looks great! As expected, it being Word, small caps and petite caps are unaccessible.

In InDesign, I was able to access the capital rounded eng with low hook and the small capital rounded eng with low hook via the Glyphs panel, but I could not find a way to access the petite cap rounded eng with low hook nor any of the three rounded eng with baseline hook variants (capital, small cap, or petite cap). Is there another way to access them (or am I just doing it wrong)?

[psb1558]

I forgot to punch the button that updates the aalt feature, which is what ID relies on to construct its glyph panel. Sorry about that! It will be there next time.

Interestingly, InDesign is perfecty capable of applying any OpenType feature to text, but it has just never bothered to creat the UI to do so. There are a couple of scripts that purport to do it, one here and one here, but I'm having trouble making them work with Junicode (the latter, I suspect, is being tripped up by the presence of cvNN descriptions).

I heartily wish that ID would stop this BS and just provide a way to apply OT features the way other apps do. For that matter, I wish they'd expand their pitiful list of supported languages. I keep Creative Cloud around for PhotoShop, and to test fonts, but any time I try to do anything serious with InDesign, I quickly end up back with XeTeX or LuaTeX.

[psb1558]

With the fixes that will be in Junicode version 2.003 (probably this Friday), the scripts that allow you to apply OpenType features directly will start to work. The two I know of (linked above) are both good, but on balance I recommend open-type-features by Roland Degers. Just a big tabbed dialog allowing you to choose any OT feature, and a straightforward way to use indexed features like cvNN too. It doesn't display cv labels, but then not many apps do (yet).

[ischaap]

The various alternate engs are accessible in InDesign now, thank you @psb1558!