Update font metadata to show support for BM (West Africa)

[boydkelly]

It seems that STIX fonts supports the necessary glyphs for the manden group of languages spoken by some 40 million people in West Africa. However the font does not show support for BM (Bambara). The glyphs required are the following:

glyphs=("U+014a" "U+014b" "U+0254" "U+0186" "U+025b" "U+0190" "U+019d")

And in the screenshot it does appear that these are available.

Can the metadata be updated to show support for these glyphs and the Bambara language?

See: https://coastsystems.net/blog/en/2020-08-26-fontlist/

[tiroj]

The STIX fonts do not currently contain a meta table, which can record specific script/language design targets and support (where design targets are intentional and support might be accidental, as in this case). Most fonts with meta tables, however, only record script, not languages, as the list of tags for the latter can be numerous and are easily incomplete for language support.

There are a variety of tools that can be used to compile lists of supported languages, and this is something we could do for the STIX Two fonts, and publish these in the repo for informative purposes, without any guarantee that the list is 100% accurate or complete.

[boydkelly]

Thank you.... Just curious does the following come from Google ?
fc-scan --format "%{lang}\n" STIXTwoText-VariableFont_wght.ttf
aa|af|ast|av|ay|be|bg|bi|bin|br|bs|ca|ce|ch|co|cs|cy|da|de|el|en|eo|es|et|eu|fi|fj|fo|fr|fur|fy|ga|gd|gl|gn|gv|haw|ho|hr|hu|ia|ig|id|ie|ik|io|is|it|ki|kl|kum|la|lb|lez|lt|lv|mg|mh|mi|mk|mo|mt|nb|nds|nl|nn|no|nr|nso|ny|oc|om|os|pl|pt|rm|ro|ru|se|sel|shs|sk|sl|sm|sma|smj|smn|so|sq|sr|ss|st|sv|sw|tk|tl|tn|to|tr|ts|uk|uz|ve|vi|vo|vot|wa|wen|wo|xh|yap|zu|an|crh|csb|fil|hsb|ht|hz|jv|kj|ku-tr|kwm|lg|li|ms|na|ng|pap-an|pap-aw|qu|quz|rn|rw|sc|sg|sn|su|ty|za

[moyogo]

fc-scan is a fontconfig tool.
The language requirements it uses are likely those in fc-lang: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/tree/main/fc-lang?ref_type=heads

[moyogo]

By the way, Bambara is not supported, as fc-scan correctly shows. The fc-lang definition file for Bambara bm.orth correctly lists the uppercase characters that should be included, namely: 0186 Ɔ and 019D Ɲ.

[boydkelly]

ah ok. So it is missing then two uppercase glyphs. (I need to add the upper case to my sample text.) Then it would be awesome to add these as well since the lower case are already there!!! Anyway thanks for the feedback. We don't have a lot of options for the 40 million mandenkan speakers. There are many other languages in West Africa that are related and use the same characters. ie Jula/Dioula in Côte d'Ivoire/Guinée, Mandingo in Liberia. There are many others, that could benefit, and you are soooo close! But hey even lower case is a bonus!

[tiroj]

I may add a meta table for v2.25, but probably only if I switch the build process to the general Tiro builder tool instead of the earlier custom tool used for v2.13. However, the meta table will only record script support, not languages.