{"action":"created","issue":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6","repository_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine","labels_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6/labels{/name}","comments_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6/comments","events_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6/events","html_url":"https://github.com/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6","id":181433466,"number":6,"title":"language groups","user":{"login":"ChristTrekker","id":8314335,"avatar_url":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/8314335?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker","html_url":"https://github.com/ChristTrekker","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/ChristTrekker/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"labels":[],"state":"open","locked":false,"assignee":null,"assignees":[],"milestone":null,"comments":1,"created_at":"2016-10-06T14:38:06Z","updated_at":"2016-10-06T20:50:09Z","closed_at":null,"body":"I recently emailed this to @christopheradams  and he suggested I share it here.\r\n\r\n--✄✂==✄✂--✄✂==✄✂--\r\n\r\nI find myself wondering why we have some of the language groups we do, and what exactly some of them are.\r\n\r\n* What is included in Western European?\r\n* What is included in Central European?\r\n* What's in Baltic?\r\n* Isn't Dutch a western European language? It uses one letter not in basic Latin. Hardly enough to set it by itself.\r\n* Isn't Afrikaans just a variant of Dutch with some common accents?\r\n* Is Romanian reported separately due to having three unique accented letters?\r\n* Why is Turkish separate? Its additions to basic Latin are shared by other languages.\r\n\r\nI've been trying to document which languages I've included in new orthography groups I've created, but some of the existing ones didn't do this. I've even thought about adding this detail to the OrthographyData structure, so it could be made visible to users.\r\n\r\nI understand there's rationale for separate reporting of Euro, because it's relatively new and lots of people use it, so it's good to know if it's supported. But the same could be said of the new rupee symbol. Do we add reporting for rupee?\r\n\r\nEsperanto was recently added, but is there good rationale to keep it separate from (just added) Latin Constructs?\r\n\r\nI've no problem having a single-language reporting group, if that group doesn't have strong symbol overlap with others. But if it does, shouldn't we have them combined?\r\n\r\nRelated example: When creating Asian Cyrillic, I found one very minor language (Kildin Sami - only a few hundred speakers) accounted for 8 additional letters. So a font developer could completely support this group, except for 16 characters that almost no one uses, and still be reported as significantly deficient. Is this important to us in any way? Should cases like this be split into their own groups, like Coptic (and Romanian)? (But do we want to support a single-language group only of interest to a few hundred?) Even before the Unicode disunification, Coptic had enough additional letters that I wouldn't have wanted it grouped under Greek. Fonts supporting just basic Greek would have reported as significantly deficient, again due to missing some very-seldom-used characters.\r\n\r\nAlso, I'd like to see groups include ALL the letters necessary for support of languages in that group. Currently, we'd report \"Western European\" support at 100% even if Basic Latin was completely missing. Obviously that's be wrong. Reporting of Basic Latin could remain, as it represents full support of traditional ASCII (ISO 8859) letters (and English). Likewise Basic Cyrillic, representing old ISO 8859-5, is \"most of\" the characters for \"most of\" the languages, but not really everything needed for any one of them (except Russian). \r\n\r\nThe exception to this would be where certain characters are optional. Hebrew can be (and usually is) written with only the characters from our Hebrew orthography. Niqqud (vowels) are optional, usually only added to aid students learning the language. So it's common in Hebrew font development to say, e.g., a font has full Hebrew support but only 50% niqqud support.\r\n\r\nI don't know what the original thinking was, but some consistent ground rules would be good, I think."},"comment":{"url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/comments/252084484","html_url":"https://github.com/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6#issuecomment-252084484","issue_url":"https://api.github.com/repos/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6","id":252084484,"user":{"login":"piratical","id":14616524,"avatar_url":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/14616524?v=3","gravatar_id":"","url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical","html_url":"https://github.com/piratical","followers_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/followers","following_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/following{/other_user}","gists_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/gists{/gist_id}","starred_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/starred{/owner}{/repo}","subscriptions_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/subscriptions","organizations_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/orgs","repos_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/repos","events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/events{/privacy}","received_events_url":"https://api.github.com/users/piratical/received_events","type":"User","site_admin":false},"created_at":"2016-10-06T20:50:09Z","updated_at":"2016-10-06T20:50:09Z","body":"Hi, everyone,\n\nWhen I originally wrote fontaine, I summarised my thinking on this very\nrelevant but potentially complicated issue in the following few paragraphs\non the fontaine documentation web site:\n\nhttp://unifont.org/fontaine/#ortho_groups\n\n... and I direct interested readers to see what I wrote there, for what it\nis worth.\n\nA few years after writing that, I spoke with Dave Crossland on a number of\noccasions about the idea of funding a sort of \"*Global Orthography Database*\"\nproject ( hmmm ... I am not sure if \"*GOD*\" is the best acronym for that\npotential project ... ? ).\n\nThe idea of the global orthography database would be to document and\ncatalogue exactly which letters are used by which languages. But not only\nthat.\n\nThe idea would also be to catalogue well-known groups or inventories of\nletters, such as the *MUFI* (Medieval Unicode Font Initiative,\nhttp://folk.uib.no/hnooh/mufi/fonts/).\n\nSuch a database could be extremely useful on many many practical fronts.\nFor example, I began compiling data on the numbers of speakers of given\nlanguages using data sources such as *Ethnologue*. While the Ethnologue\nestimates are often out-of-date or otherwise questionable in one way or\nanother, they are still arguably valid for use as \"order of magnitude\"\napproximations.  Thus, for example, one can sort out languages which *(i)*\nhave over 100 million speakers, *(ii)* between 10 million to 99.99 million,\n*(iii)* between 1 to 9.99 million, *(iv)* under 1 million, *(v)* under\n500,000, *(vi)* under 100,000 speakers, etc.\n\nThe exact category breakpoints may be subject to debate. Nevertheless, once\none has compiled such data, then we can ask really interesting questions\nsuch as:\n\n*\"Among languages in category (i) or (ii), how many of these languages\nstill remain unsupported on the latest Android and iOS smartphones due to a\nlack of supporting fonts and keyboard entry methods?\"*\n\nFor example, take a language such as *Igbo*, spoken in *Nigeria*, which has\naround 24 million speakers. Igbo uses the Latin alphabet but requires a few\nspecial diacritics on some letters, such as a dot below certain vowels\n(e.g.: \"ụ\" , \"ọ\" etc.)  If I remember correctly (disclaimer: I did these\nnumerical exercises a few years ago), the total population of Igbo speakers\nis slightly less the population of the U.S. state of Texas, and more than\nthe U.S. state of Florida.\n\nSo, to put this in terms that surely companies like Google and Apple and\nMicrosoft can understand, *Igbo is a potential market somewhere in size\nbetween Florida and Texas*. In other words, some of these are potentially\nbig markets, and it would make a hell of a lot of sense to fund a project\nthat would put together this kind of data.\n\nAnd how does a software tool like fontaine fit in?  Here is an idea: a\nfuture version of fontaine could download on-the-fly the orthographical\nrequirements data for any specific language or orthography group directly\nfrom the GOD database.  For example, a relevant query on this presumed\nfuture fontaine tool might be:\n\n*\"Show me all fonts on my system (or on some web-based font store) which\nsupport Igbo orthography.\"*\n\nAnd of course \"Igbo\" is just one example. You can substitute \"Igbo\" with\nwhatever your favorite language or orthography group happens to be.\n\nIf folks are interested in collaborating on such a project, let's talk!\n\nBest Wishes — Ed\n(fontaine author)\n\nOn Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 3:16 PM, ChristTrekker <notifications@github.com>\nwrote:\n\n> From his reply, I believe that we are focused on addressing user needs as\n> currently known, as opposed to trying to find the \"best\" approach for\n> grouping language scripts. For example, font shops check for \"Turkish\" and\n> \"Central European\" support, so we have groups that match those checks to\n> simplify it for them.\n>\n> (As an aside, I'll mention I was thinking more from the perspective of\n> users being individuals checking if fonts would work for themselves, not\n> shops checking if fonts would work for their customers. So now this makes\n> more sense to me. It's not just an academic exercise of \"which related\n> languages also use highly-related alphabets?\" as I'd thought, though\n> related to that.)\n>\n> So we want to be responsive to what actual users actually want and use,\n> but at the same time, I'm sure there are lots of (amateur) developers that\n> will be content with supporting only their own language script. How far do\n> we go to catering to thousands of potential language tests?\n>\n> All that being said, is \"Turkish\" literally only Turkish, or does it\n> include other Common Turkic languages like Tatar and Uzbek? If it's the\n> broader group, I'd like to report the name as \"Common Turkic\" or even just\n> \"Turkic\" so it's clear that it's not a single-language group. I'll try to\n> check on this. If we can change the name to being more correct, while\n> leaving the testing exactly what users currently need, I think that's a\n> win/win.\n>\n> W.E. may include Albanian, Breton, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English,\n> Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Norwegian (+ Bokmål &\n> Nynorsk Norwegian), Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romance, Spanish, Swedish. If anyone\n> can confirm, that would be great. I'll try to verify this against our list.\n>\n> Christopher said the Dutch are really into font design. ☺ That may be so,\n> but unless a lot of people are actually checking for Dutch support apart\n> from other WE languages, I don't think we need an extra group for two\n> characters. Same for Afrikaans. Just one character not in WE already. Do\n> real typographers really see Dutch as a special-enough case to have\n> separate testing? Similarly for Catalan. Is there a big contingent that\n> specifically check if their fonts will work for Andorrans? Or were these\n> three arbitrary because W.E. corresponds with a check of Latin1-Supplement\n> characters, so anything outside that needed a different orthography?\n>\n> C.E. may include Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian,\n> Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Sorbian (Lower &\n> Upper). Again, confirmation appreciated, and I'll try to check that too.\n>\n> Baltic seems to be a subset of CE, including Estonian, Latvian,\n> Lithuanian. If this were the \"ideal\" I was thinking, I'd probably say this\n> is redundant, and either eliminate this group, or remove Baltic-specific\n> characters from CE. Again, if this is to support real-world usage, that's\n> fine, but I'd like to get some sense of confirmation of that, because if\n> not, it doesn't make sense.\n>\n> Romanian is also a subset of CE. Same thing here. If there is a large\n> Romanian type community that looks only at Romanian, I suppose that's okay,\n> but otherwise....\n>\n> Esperanto was added by request, so by popular demand we have it. The\n> non-Basic-Latin bits are pretty disjoint from other Latin Constructs, so it\n> makes sense to have separate reporting, as AFAIK Esperanto is the biggest\n> conlang in use.\n>\n> Using that logic, I think I will remove the Sami-specific additions to\n> Asian Cyrillic. It's fairly disjoint from the others, and should maybe have\n> its own report.\n>\n> I'll be adding reporting of rupee (and maybe ruble) in its own group (as\n> with euro) unless someone beats me to it. These particular separate\n> reporting groups are something that could probably be phased out over time.\n> The euro is 20 years old now—is that considered enough time for it to be\n> considered mainstream in font design like any other \"international\"\n> character?\n>\n> I don't work in a foundry, so I don't know how professional type\n> developers decide upon which languages to create characters for. If anyone\n> seeing this does, I'd love to hear about it. I'm a programmer by trade,\n> with type as a hobby. If we can simplify and make things more logical, but\n> still keep them useful, everyone can win.\n>\n> —\n> You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.\n> Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub\n> <https://github.com/fontlibrary/fontaine/issues/6#issuecomment-252061292>,\n> or mute the thread\n> <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AN8HzCQC94NDH36mwS_ZbYiS7A3F2CPgks5qxUkCgaJpZM4KQBO2>\n> .\n>\n"}}
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