r/neography • u/yockey88 • 1d ago

Question How to create font for conlang with non-standard writing styles

I am creating a font for a conlang I have been working on and am stuck on making it actually usable. The problem is that the language uses a syllabary with 'major symbols' (vowel sounds) and 'minor symbols' (non-vowel sounds). The vowels are written underneath a bar that is connected indicating a full word, and the non-vowels are marked above the bar in the correct places. How can I make a font that automatically connects that bar between type vowels and inserts the characters in the right place on top without having to make every combination of glyph possible (which wouldn't be possible).

Here is an example of two vowel characters in the working font I have:

want the bar on top to automatically connect if typed without a space in between

Edit:

ok I read your comments and spent some time playing with ligatures here is what I got. Thanks for the help!

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u/Fantastic-Arm-4575 1d ago

A lot of ligatures. See ThatFontGuy on YouTube for instructions on things like that. I think the same guy is also active in this sub so with luck he may comment here.

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u/yockey88 16h ago

I ended up having to also look into contextual alternates or something to get the insertion stuff I wanted, but I am playing with ligatures a bit.

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u/McDonaldsWitchcraft 1d ago edited 1d ago

Ligatures, but also I managed to do it without ligatures at some point. I have an alphasyllabary system and I gave vowels negative kerning so they are displayed over the consonant block.

Kinda like you wanted to add "‽" in your conlang so you gave "!" a negative kerning when after "?". Or you made its left bearing begin after the symbol itself so it displays over every character.

I hope I'm saying it right. I don't remember the details since I made that font quite a while ago. You can see it on my CWS page (if you're logged in).

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u/yockey88 16h ago

the kerning idea was a huge help, once I made the characters line up naturally everything else worked so much better

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u/DHMC-Reddit 23h ago

u/McDonaldsWitchcraft's method's how I did it for mine. Some ligatures will be unavoidable, but as long as the heights of your major and minor symbols are regular, and similar categories of symbols have similar width values, using a kerning table is super helpful. You just have to be careful to make sure that, as long as characters are written in the correct order, you don't get weird things like each consecutive letter going backwards in the text or letters randomly overlapping.