The Widmann Blog: typography

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A symbol for “is pronounced the same as”

2012/01/08 0:13
Yesterday's blog posting made me think about the lack of a symbol for "is pronounced the same as".What I mean is that instead of writing that "write is pronounced the same as right", we could just write "write ≗ right".I here used the symbol "≗", not because I think it's ideal, but because it's available. Other available Unicode characters based...

Font design

2008/07/22 22:56
Normally when you design a font these days, you use a program like FontForge, which is basically a glorified drawing program.You can do anything you want, but it's basically up to you to make the individual characters looks similar so that they combine to form a unified and beautiful font.If you use a program like METAFONT instead, you have more...

Typesetting Gaelic in Gaelic type

2013/03/29 18:07

Gaelic in Gadelica.

Gaelic in Gadelica.

In Ireland, Gaelic type is widely used for writing Irish (although mainly for decorative purposes these days, if I’m not mistaken). On the other hand, it’s hardly ever used in Scotland, although Irish and Scottish Gaelic are very closely related.

However, I thought it’d be nice to be able to typeset Gaelic in Gaelic type using TeX/LaTeX/XeLaTeX.

After a big of googling, I found a very nice font called Gadelica.

This is a beautiful OpenType font (and it supports the grave accents used in Scottish Gaelic, not just the acute ones used in Irish), but there is a slight problem: It assumes that the dotted letters (e.g., ‘ċ’ instead of ‘ch’) have been coded in Unicode rather than using the normal digraphs.

To solve this, I created a TECkit mapping (see below for the complete mapping file). Once you’ve compiled it, you can now easily create a XeLaTeX document and select font and mapping with \setromanfont[Mapping=gadelica]{Gadelica}, and you can now input the normal ligatures. For instance, the second line in the illustration above is simply given as Dh’fheuch am faic mi fear a’ bhàta in the source file.

Here’s the complete mapping file, gadelica.map (compile with teckit_compile gadelica.map):

LHSName "Gadelica"
RHSName "UNICODE"

pass(Unicode)

U+0062 U+0068 <> U+1E03 ;bh
U+0063 U+0068 <> U+010B ;ch
U+0064 U+0068 <> U+1E0B ;dh
U+0066 U+0068 <> U+1E1F ;fh
U+0067 U+0068 <> U+0121 ;gh
U+006D U+0068 <> U+1E41 ;mh
U+0070 U+0068 <> U+1E57 ;ph
U+0073 U+0068 <> U+1E61 ;sh
U+0074 U+0068 <> U+1E6B ;th
U+0042 U+0048 <> U+1E02 ;BH
U+0043 U+0048 <> U+010A ;CH
U+0044 U+0048 <> U+1E0A ;DH
U+0046 U+0048 <> U+1E1E ;FH
U+0047 U+0048 <> U+0120 ;GH
U+004D U+0048 <> U+1E40 ;MH
U+0050 U+0048 <> U+1E56 ;PH
U+0053 U+0048 <> U+1E60 ;SH
U+0054 U+0048 <> U+1E6A ;TH
U+0053 U+0048 <> U+1E60 ;SH
U+0054 U+0048 <> U+1E6A ;TH
U+0042 U+0068 <> U+1E02 ;Bh
U+0043 U+0068 <> U+010A ;Ch
U+0044 U+0068 <> U+1E0A ;Dh
U+0046 U+0068 <> U+1E1E ;Fh
U+0047 U+0068 <> U+0120 ;Gh
U+004D U+0068 <> U+1E40 ;Mh
U+0050 U+0068 <> U+1E56 ;Ph
U+0053 U+0068 <> U+1E60 ;Sh
U+0054 U+0068 <> U+1E6A ;Th

; Some stuff from tex-text.map:
U+002D U+002D <> U+2013 ; -- -> en dash
U+002D U+002D U+002D <> U+2014 ; --- -> em dash

U+0027 <> U+2019 ; ' -> right single quote
U+0027 U+0027 <> U+201D ; '' -> right double quote
U+0022 > U+201D ; " -> right double quote

U+0060 <> U+2018 ; ` -> left single quote
U+0060 U+0060 <> U+201C ; `` -> left double quote

TECkit

2009/10/13 18:17
After the Mac arrived last week, one of the first programs I installed was TeXShop.That caused me to play around with XeTeX, which – although it's also available for Linux – I had never really got around to playing around with.One interesting feature I noticed immediately was the maps: When loading a font one can specify an input mapping like this: \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium} and this will cause -- to be mapped to – etc.I wanted to play around with this, but...

How to make business cards in LaTeX

2009/05/27 16:53
When we set up our company, we needed some business cards.VistaPrint will make business cards from a PDF file made according to the following specifications: "Full Bleed Size: 90mm x 52mm; Document Trim Size: 87mm x 49mm".I prefer doing typography in LaTeX, so I just needed to set this up properly.I had a few problems with the margins, but with...

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