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Icelandic Question
So, I'm building a template for the features and hierarchy of all the glyphs in the Latin-1 layout and I have a question about the Icelandic eth.
Vertically, the character has two parts, the bowl below and the crossed ascender.
As the resolution descends and there are not enough pixels, is it better to lower the height of the bowl and give additional pixels to the ascender, or is it better to let the ascender just become a blob of undistinguished but fairly unique pixels so the bowl can remain at the x-height, from an Icelandic point of view?
Thanks in advance for any insights.
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18 Apr 2011 — 5:23am
Lowering the bowl is better.
18 Apr 2011 — 6:23am
Thank you, I've often wondered about this one. I usually end up straightening the crossbar at small sizes.
jason
18 Apr 2011 — 7:39am
Third option (not necessarily/always recommended): break the EM - let the ascender rise. The UC accents do that after all.
BTW, one way to "lower" the bowl is to keep the top at the x-line but make the bowl more teardrop-shaped, like here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ohbendy/5462601945
hhp
18 Apr 2011 — 7:39am
>Lowering the bowl is better.
I thought you're Danish. How do I know you're not out to make trouble.
18 Apr 2011 — 10:08am
It's like Palin with Russia. ;-)
hhp
18 Apr 2011 — 10:55am
If you have really short ascenders, how do you even distinguish thorn from wynn?
18 Apr 2011 — 11:04am
That seems much less problematic than "h" vs "n", because of frequency as well as deviation below the middle of the x-height.
hhp
18 Apr 2011 — 11:31am
Briem drops it below the x-height:
http://www.fontshop.com/fonts/singles/creative_alliance/briem_mono_bold/
That's also what I do when things get tight.
There are some other glyphs where there is a precedent for this kind of technique, eg Cyrillic б and ф.
It's also common practice for "g" in many sans faces (raising the bowl above the baseline to accommodate the extender business).
18 Apr 2011 — 12:08pm
I thought you're Danish. How do I know you're not out to make trouble.
We are vikings, would we ever cause trouble?