[4 new] Expansion: 'Ḥ', 'ḥ', 'Ḷ' and 'ḷ' needed for Asturian (ast-ES)

Future updates of the fonts will probably include 'Latin Extended Additional' Unicode block to enable support for Vietnamese, transliterated Arabic and Indic plus other European Latin based languages such as Asturian.

Asturian would probably be a fairly good candidate for sanity checking the community-expansion process (if the working on the Latin supplementals has not covered it already): Low number of glyph additions, and Latin basis.

Hi guys,

just a little issue:

I'm sure that when you type " ‼ " (wrong) you mean: " ḷḷ " (right)

;)

@Iñigo: Yes!
The subject has a wrong character.
The correct is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%B6

Iñigo, Costales: thank you for fixing that!

Interestingly:

  $ FC_DEBUG=256 fc-query /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu-font-family/Ubuntu-R.ttf | grep ast
 am(264) an(0) ar(36) as(64) ast(0) av(0) ay(0)

shows Asturian as having no missing codepoints; but it's possible that FontConfig is wrong here; for instance the "ar(36)" means that Arabic support will need coverage at 36 further codepoints.

I have opened a bug about the codepoint ranges used for matching missing 'ḥ' and 'ḷḷ', those directly familiar with Asturian may wish to follow-up there!

  https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=32965

@Paul: Thanks very much for fill the bug in Freedesktop ;)

Costales: Indeed! It would be useful if you could reply to the FreeDesktop.org bug report, and assist with making contact with Sanchez Vicente about whether these two codepoints should be included in the Asturian Language Academy grammar.

At the moment it has exceeded my local knowledge and language skills. It really needs somebody who speaks and reads Asturian to get to the bottom of it.

Done ;)
@Paul: The Sanchez Vicente's text is old and not official.
The official text about these 2 letters is this (page 16 & 17):
http://www.academiadelallingua.com/diccionariu/gramatica_llingua.pdf
Best regards :)

I second what Costales wrote: Asturian Language Academy is an official body of the Asturian Government, and the governing authority on Asturian language.

Also, you may find the full set of Asturian characters here:
http://developer.mimer.com/charts/asturian.htm

Xuacu: I don't doubt the need for these two characters in the Ubuntu Font Family, but if you also want the upstream FontConfig detection code fixing you'll need to comment there too (it's a slightly different, but related issue).

At the moment 'ḥ' and '‼', this is not because they aren't valuable, or important they won't be in the first wave though, as it is just not possible to do everything at once and the current focus is spread thinly across Arabic, Hebrew, Condensed, Light, Medium and Mono as it is!

Paul: I'm very sorry if I sounded a bit too demanding. That wasn't what I intended and, perhaps, I did a poor wording in my message. It was just to add some other sources to this bug report.

I fully understand that the font team must have priorities... no problem. Keep going your awesome work!

Best regards.

In the mean-time lets concentrate on getting FontConfig's definition of Asturian fixed (upstream) over at:

  https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32965

As of 2012-02-20 22:11 PST this bug was marked as RESOLVED and FIXED upstream:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org//show_bug.cgi?id=32965#c12

Xuacu: thanks for following this through and ensuring that the Asturian definition is fixed in FontConfig upstream (we'll try to get 'Ḥ', 'ḥ', 'Ḷ' and 'ḷ' into the Ubuntu Font Family eventually, but I don't know how long it'll be.