Clerical Rigor

Font for composing Lushootseed

At the recommendation of David Beck, I have installed a TTF font from http://www.languagegeek.com/. It took a few minutes for me to figure out how to get it going, but it was pretty straightforward after that. Here are some quick instructions for those of you running Debian variants such as Ubuntu.

  1. Fetch the zip files from languagegeek.com and unpack: 
    $ sudo mkdir -m777 -p /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype/languagegeek/
$ cd /usr/local/share/fonts/truetype/languagegeek/
$ for zip in AboriginalSerif.zip AboriginalSans.zip
do
  wget http://www.languagegeek.com/font/$zip &&
  unzip $zip &&
  rm $zip
done
$ sudo chmod -R 755 .
  2. Register these fonts with the system using defoma (the debian font manager): 
    $ for font in *.ttf
do
  sudo defoma-font register truetype $PWD/$font
done

While performing the defoma registration, I was presented with a number of warning-ish-looking messages for each file processed. For better or worse, I am ignoring them:

No CIDSupplement specified for Dotum-Bold, defaulting to 0.
No CIDSupplement specified for Batang-Regular, defaulting to 0.
No CIDSupplement specified for ZenHei-CNS, defaulting to 0.
No CIDSupplement specified for Batang-Bold, defaulting to 0.
No CIDSupplement specified for ZenHei, defaulting to 0.
No CIDSupplement specified for Dotum-Regular, defaulting to 0.

I used gnome-appearance-properties (System → Preferences → Appearance) to set my document font to Aboriginal Sans:


After telling Chromium that it should use these fonts, it renders all of the Lushootseed characters quite nicely.


C.J. Collier

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10 responses to “Font for composing Lushootseed”

  1. Cool, I’ll have to check out that font. I’m still sort of looking for a good, free Lepcha font, but that is for a fantasy world of my own.

    Any reason for picking up the font? Or just to have a quirky one?

    Reply

    • Heya Dylan! Long time no see. I was thinking about you (and lojban) recently.

      Yeah, I chose this font because it is the only one I can find that renders the č̓ character correctly:

      Reply

      • Very cool. Actually, I’ve been working a bit with Lojban, mainly for my own fantasy world. Mostly using that as a base and using rafsi a HELL of a lot more than formal gismu or luvjo.

        This year, I decided to drop larger programming projects and just work at writing. I had to pick one or the other. So, my steampunk world it is.

        (Well, and that whole wife is pregnant thing that will change everything in August.)

        Actually, the Lepcha comment was for that world. I’m using that as the script for the Lojban-based language in the world. Using diatrics for the vowels (ala the Tengwar mapping for Lojban) with some modification for the “.a” and “.ii” stuff.

        Reply

  3. You can just create the directory “.fonts” in your home dir and copy ttf files there.

    I think GNOME even lets you right-click to “install” fonts in this manner.

    Reply

  5. I thought I posted a message here but do not see it, so I’ll try again.

    I’ve been workingn with Lushootseed (primarily the southern dialect) for several years and have a website at http//pugetsalish.com. There, you can downlaod my font, fontootseed, and other materials under the Free Downloads section. There’s also other materials for sale under the E-shop tab.

    Hope this helps,

    Zalmai

    Reply

    • Hi there Zalmai!

      Sorry for the delay, but I manually approve the first posting by all users in order to avoid having the site over-flow with unsolicited links to scary sites.

      I installed this font on my system. You should remove the section about only supporting windows, since this is what had kept me from trying it out earlier. It should work just fine on any platform which supports true type fonts, including Mac OS X and most Linux distributions, Solaris, *BSD, etc.

      This font seems like it would be great for typing Lushootseed! Right now, I am content to copy/paste the non-latin characters. Since the documents I am building include both Lushootseed and Latin characters, I need a font that will render both Latin and Lushootseed. As I become more familiar with the language, though, it is good to know that there is a font that will allow me to directly enter the language from my keyboard.

      On another topic, would you be willing to vet the sentences in our test suite? We need a native speaker to verify that we have understood the descriptions of the language well enough to generate grammatical sentences. I believe that Daniel and I have about 30 minutes this afternoon for a phone conference if you are available. It would be after our class around 3:00.

      Thank you for taking the time to write. I’ve been looking forward to the opportunity to speak with you!

      C.J.

      P.S., my interest is primarily on the Southern Dialect, since I spent my teen years living in Suquamish ;)

      Reply

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