Latin-style fonts with dotted consonants — how to avoid repeating past
In Latin-style fonts which offer
dotted consonants — which potentially includes all
Latin-style Unicode fonts — we must design the dotted consonants in such a way
as to avoid the mistakes disfiguring the few books which appeared in this
script in pre-computer days.
Guidelines would necessarily include:
- the dot-over accent must be sufficiently prominent, and certainly more prominent than
the dot on lowercase i — and it may even be desirable to use dotless i
(perhaps with its top serif horizontal). The excessively inconspicuous nature of the dot,
even in established Gaelic-style fonts, is manifested in the difficulty of
training OCR software to recognise its presence or absence with any degree
- the dot-over accent must be at the same height on all the lowercase letters,
including those with ascenders like b, d, f, t. This is what gives
Gaelic script its tidy appearance, and (most) accents in Latin script are
also at a uniform height for lowercase. There should not be a problem with b
and d, though a top serif on d may need to be removed or turned around.
The top of t may be truncated. Lowercase f may be lowered, and a
descender may be allowed — something like a script f but not going
into the ascender area. But the style of these letters must remain thoroughly Latin and not be Gaelicised.
(Compare the opinions of William Britton quoted on pages 190–2 of
McGuinne's "Irish Type Design"; also now the f and t of Úrchló
- it is not absolutely necessary that a round dot be
used at all, and we should experiment visually with other possibilities, to
achieve the necessary distinctiveness, and uniformity over a variety of base
these possibilities might include an elliptical dot; or a macron (though not a long thin
one), which might be allowed to cross the verticals of b and d, though it
could not be allowed to cross f and t since they already have a crossbar without lenition.
Ciarán Ó Duibhín
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