Font design and features for African languages
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Moyogo Jacquerye, Denis
This presentation will discuss the requirements of orthographies for African languages in Latin scripts and shows how to implement them with modern fonts technologies. Good practices, mistakes and evaluation of fonts for African languages with high requirements will be discussed. The presentation will also showcase various font projects that are benefitting from the input, feedback and work of the Open Source community.
 Hello everybody. I'm Dennis Jacquerie. My presentation is about form designing features for African languages. So the first question is why would you want to design fonts for African languages? And then I'm going to talk about what are the actual needs of African languages, recording fonts. And then I'm going to talk about some fonts I've been doing work with. So the situation right now in Africa is there's about 2,000 languages. So it's quite a lot considering some organizations count about 8,000 for the whole world. And about 25 languages are spoken by half of Africa. So dealing with African languages is something that's quite feasible if you just want to cover half of Africa. And most of, oh, sorry. There's a mistake here. It should be 20% do have orthography. So actually 80% don't have an orthography. But most African languages are in the same language families. And so most of them share the same features. And so very often if one language has already an orthography or a spelling or some published text, the neighbor language can probably reuse the same set of orthographic rules and things like that and characters. The thing with African languages, because most countries in Africa have only been independent for, I guess, half a century or a bit more, the colonial languages are very important. Most of them are actually using colonial languages for anything official. So the law, most of the news is written in a foreign language, pretty much, that people have to learn at school or at university. And their native languages are mostly spoken either at home or with friends or only in spoken media, so television and radio. And there's very little use of the local languages in written media. And the thing is right now, Africa is slowly developing as it should be. And so there's interest rising in companies doing business in Africa and doing business in the local languages so people can use a cell phone in their own language instead of the language they had to learn at school. And there's very few orthographies that are standardized. But that I mean that there's either an organization or a government that has set out a law that people can follow instead of arguing whether they should use one letter or the other that just follow what's standardized. So the purpose of working with the fonts for African languages is to encourage people to use their language and to publish and to trade and to do more things in their own language because it's more accessible to them. So it's easier to get organized and work together and develop things in Africa. And so it's much better for kids to learn basic stuff or even advanced stuff in their own language. So that's somewhere that things need to be easier for people to publish educational material. It's better for the press to use local languages so people can get information properly and not just have a notion of what's happening but instead know exactly what's happening. Because it's actually true a few years ago in the Congo there was an election and before that they had to vote whether they want to accept their constitution. But some people had no idea what the constitution actually was. They thought it was a presidential candidate. So to make the fonts, first you need to meet the base guineas. So I had to research what are the basic needs of most African languages that are documented. And then once I have those basic needs, the fonts can be made and published so people can start using them and publish with them. And also those fonts are with open source licenses. So it can encourage people to reuse them and modify them and be creative. So there's actually several scripts. So people don't just write with Latin characters or Arabic characters in scripts in Africa. Most languages use the Latin script because it was what was used by the colonial authorities. In Northern Africa and Western Africa, a lot of languages, also Eastern Africa, a lot of languages use Arabic script. In Ethiopia, they use the Ethiopian script. Tefana is used in North Western Africa. Nkou is a language, a script that was devised a bit more than a century ago. And it's used in some communities quite a lot. But it's in Western Africa. Fah is also in the area. And there's a lot of other scripts that have been developed by local people who wanted to have their own script instead of just using a script that was imported from somewhere else. And so actually, luckily, Latin script already supports some major African languages like Soheili, Zulu, Shona, and more. But many African languages that are widely spoken need extended Latin with special characters that are not provided by most Thai faces and fonts. For example, there's a house that's spoken in Western Africa. That's 40 million people. And they only have a handful of fonts they can use to publish or write text or read text. There's a full spoken in all Western Africa. Eastern, yeah, Western Africa. Europe, Nigeria, there's Akan, and Ghana. There's more and more. And so all of these languages, depending on which country and which colonial state was there, some of them have standardized orthographies. And some of them have only standardized them once they became independent. And some of them, even though they've been in for a while, only started looking at the local languages in the 90s or even more recently. And so the focus of the work I've done is mostly on the ones that have been standardized or the ones that have some orthography manuals published by NGOs doing work on the ground. And so the fonts, actually, there's a couple of URW fonts that are used. One is not rendered properly here. But then there's a couple of other MG open fonts. And I've also done work on the droid and liberation fonts that have been recently published. And so the needs for the characters, most of the needs are pretty simple because it's either variants of characters that already exist or it's characters where the shapes are borrowed from a Greek or sometimes a couple look like Cyrillic too. And a lot of them, as you can see at the bottom here, are just regular characters with extra parts like hooks or strokes. And of course, there's plenty of characters that are just with accents or diacritics on top or below. And because of the way Unicode works, not all the accented characters are available. So sometimes you actually need to combine an accent with a base character to produce the accented character. So the design is quite simple if you just want to do those letters. You just take the original letter and just flip it over. Then you can just borrow the letter from other scripts. So here you can see the epsilon is just quite easy to have an open E. But sometimes you might want to have a different design to match better with the Latin script. And sometimes also you might actually have conflict because here that vowel is quite similar to the V in italic. So you might want to have a different design to avoid ambiguity in that language or in those languages. Also with the hooks, sometimes in italic it's an issue. For example, here it's the F with a hook. Actually, here it's an issue in non-italic and regular because in Unicode that character is also used for the Florent, the former currency of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. So here you want to have a design that where you can clearly see the difference between the F and the F with a hook. There are also some languages where the traditional shape of a character is different from the one that's mostly used in published fonts. So here it's the ng character. So you can see there's the relo shape where it's a capital N that's the most common one in European fonts. But for African languages, people are used and prefer a shape that looks like the lowercase N. And so once you've dealt with all the different character shapes, this is of course the die critics. So that's the accents that need to be either added to these characters to have a pre-composed form. So where the accented character is one Unicode character. And sometimes you have to have two characters, meaning you have the base letter and the accent as two different characters. And so to do that, you actually need to use some features in OpenType to position them properly. And sometimes, so all you need to define is where that accent is going to anchor and where the anchor of that accent is. And so your computer should take care of combining two as the font specifies. And sometimes you also want to replace a shape. So previously, it was simply positioning the accent on top of the character. But here, you actually have the eye with a dot. And so you want to replace the eye with a dot, with an eye without a dot. So you can then position the accent on top of it without having a conflict with the dot. Then, of course, you can also have the accents below. And you can also have stacked accents, because some languages use one accent to represent the length of a vowel. And then they use another accent to indicate the tone, whether it's high or low or rising or something else. And some other languages also use the SidiLet to indicate a variation of pronunciation of vowels. So that's also something that's needed for African languages. And there you go. So all the work is published on the website, africanlocalization.net. Thank you.
 Hello everybody.  I'm Dennis Jacquerie.  My presentation is about form designing features  for African languages.  So the first question is why would  you want to design fonts for African languages?  And then I'm going to talk about what  are the actual needs of African languages,  recording fonts.  And then I'm going to talk about some fonts  I've been doing work with.  So the situation right now in Africa  is there's about 2,000 languages.  So it's quite a lot considering some organizations count  about 8,000 for the whole world.  And about 25 languages are spoken by half of Africa.  So dealing with African languages is something  that's quite feasible if you just  want to cover half of Africa.  And most of, oh, sorry.  There's a mistake here.  It should be 20% do have orthography.  So actually 80% don't have an orthography.  But most African languages are in the same language families.  And so most of them share the same features.  And so very often if one language has already  an orthography or a spelling or some published text,  the neighbor language can probably  reuse the same set of orthographic rules and things  like that and characters.  The thing with African languages, because most countries  in Africa have only been independent for, I guess,  half a century or a bit more, the colonial languages  are very important.  Most of them are actually using colonial languages  for anything official.  So the law, most of the news is written  in a foreign language, pretty much,  that people have to learn at school or at university.  And their native languages are mostly  spoken either at home or with friends  or only in spoken media, so television and radio.  And there's very little use of the local languages  in written media.  And the thing is right now, Africa is slowly developing  as it should be.  And so there's interest rising in companies  doing business in Africa and doing business  in the local languages so people can use a cell phone  in their own language instead of the language  they had to learn at school.  And there's very few orthographies that are standardized.  But that I mean that there's either an organization  or a government that has set out a law that people can follow  instead of arguing whether they should use one letter  or the other that just follow what's standardized.  So the purpose of working with the fonts for African languages  is to encourage people to use their language  and to publish and to trade and to do more things  in their own language because it's more accessible to them.  So it's easier to get organized and work together  and develop things in Africa.  And so it's much better for kids to learn basic stuff  or even advanced stuff in their own language.  So that's somewhere that things need  to be easier for people to publish educational material.  It's better for the press to use local languages  so people can get information properly  and not just have a notion of what's happening  but instead know exactly what's happening.  Because it's actually true a few years ago in the Congo  there was an election and before that they  had to vote whether they want to accept their constitution.  But some people had no idea what the constitution actually  was.  They thought it was a presidential candidate.  So to make the fonts, first you need to meet the base guineas.  So I had to research what are the basic needs of most  African languages that are documented.  And then once I have those basic needs,  the fonts can be made and published  so people can start using them and publish with them.  And also those fonts are with open source licenses.  So it can encourage people to reuse them and modify them  and be creative.  So there's actually several scripts.  So people don't just write with Latin characters  or Arabic characters in scripts in Africa.  Most languages use the Latin script  because it was what was used by the colonial authorities.  In Northern Africa and Western Africa,  a lot of languages, also Eastern Africa,  a lot of languages use Arabic script.  In Ethiopia, they use the Ethiopian script.  Tefana is used in North Western Africa.  Nkou is a language, a script that was devised a bit more  than a century ago.  And it's used in some communities quite a lot.  But it's in Western Africa.  Fah is also in the area.  And there's a lot of other scripts  that have been developed by local people who  wanted to have their own script instead of just using  a script that was imported from somewhere else.  And so actually, luckily, Latin script  already supports some major African languages  like Soheili, Zulu, Shona, and more.  But many African languages that are widely spoken  need extended Latin with special characters that  are not provided by most Thai faces and fonts.  For example, there's a house that's  spoken in Western Africa.  That's 40 million people.  And they only have a handful of fonts  they can use to publish or write text or read text.  There's a full spoken in all Western Africa.  Eastern, yeah, Western Africa.  Europe, Nigeria, there's Akan, and Ghana.  There's more and more.  And so all of these languages, depending on which country  and which colonial state was there,  some of them have standardized orthographies.  And some of them have only standardized them  once they became independent.  And some of them, even though they've been in for a while,  only started looking at the local languages in the 90s  or even more recently.  And so the focus of the work I've done  is mostly on the ones that have been standardized  or the ones that have some orthography manuals published  by NGOs doing work on the ground.  And so the fonts, actually, there's  a couple of URW fonts that are used.  One is not rendered properly here.  But then there's a couple of other MG open fonts.  And I've also done work on the droid and liberation fonts  that have been recently published.  And so the needs for the characters, most of the needs  are pretty simple because it's either variants of characters  that already exist or it's characters  where the shapes are borrowed from a Greek or sometimes  a couple look like Cyrillic too.  And a lot of them, as you can see at the bottom here,  are just regular characters with extra parts like hooks  or strokes.  And of course, there's plenty of characters that are just  with accents or diacritics on top or below.  And because of the way Unicode works,  not all the accented characters are available.  So sometimes you actually need to combine an accent  with a base character to produce the accented character.  So the design is quite simple if you just  want to do those letters.  You just take the original letter and just flip it over.  Then you can just borrow the letter from other scripts.  So here you can see the epsilon is just  quite easy to have an open E. But sometimes you  might want to have a different design to match better  with the Latin script.  And sometimes also you might actually  have conflict because here that vowel is quite similar  to the V in italic.  So you might want to have a different design  to avoid ambiguity in that language or in those languages.  Also with the hooks, sometimes in italic it's an issue.  For example, here it's the F with a hook.  Actually, here it's an issue in non-italic and regular  because in Unicode that character is also  used for the Florent, the former currency of the Kingdom  of the Netherlands.  So here you want to have a design that  where you can clearly see the difference between the F  and the F with a hook.  There are also some languages where  the traditional shape of a character  is different from the one that's mostly used  in published fonts.  So here it's the ng character.  So you can see there's the relo shape  where it's a capital N that's the most common one  in European fonts.  But for African languages, people are used and prefer  a shape that looks like the lowercase N.  And so once you've dealt with all the different character  shapes, this is of course the die critics.  So that's the accents that need to be either added to these  characters to have a pre-composed form.  So where the accented character is one Unicode character.  And sometimes you have to have two characters,  meaning you have the base letter and the accent as two  different characters.  And so to do that, you actually need  to use some features in OpenType to position them properly.  And sometimes, so all you need to define  is where that accent is going to anchor  and where the anchor of that accent is.  And so your computer should take care of combining two  as the font specifies.  And sometimes you also want to replace a shape.  So previously, it was simply positioning the accent  on top of the character.  But here, you actually have the eye with a dot.  And so you want to replace the eye with a dot,  with an eye without a dot.  So you can then position the accent on top of it  without having a conflict with the dot.  Then, of course, you can also have the accents below.  And you can also have stacked accents,  because some languages use one accent  to represent the length of a vowel.  And then they use another accent to indicate the tone,  whether it's high or low or rising or something else.  And some other languages also use the SidiLet  to indicate a variation of pronunciation of vowels.  So that's also something that's needed for African languages.  And there you go.  So all the work is published on the website,  africanlocalization.net.  Thank you.
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