[OpenFontLibrary] Old Nubian Typefont

[Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei]

Dear Open Font Library community,

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm Vincent van Gerven Oei and  
part of my work relates to the arcane and penniless field of Old  
Nubian philology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Nubian). I heard  
about your mailing list from my friend Eric Schrijver.

Old Nubian was a language spoken and written around our Middle Ages,  
and there is small academic community that deals with this fringe  
language. The main issue in academic publishing about this language is  
the lack of a type face. Some years ago I tried to design a TrueType  
font, but that never really worked out.

My plan/suggestion appeals to anyone who would be interested to (help)  
design for the first time design a "real" and open-source font for  
this dead language, intended for the academic community (publications,  
journals) and the people protecting the heritage of the current Nubian  
population in northern Sudan.

There is an example of the script on the wikipedia site mentioned above.

The font would consist of
- 30 characters, no difference between upper and lower case, plus some  
additional "rare" glyphs. most of the characters look like Greek/ 
Coptic uncials typical for the North African region, they are a bit  
"sharper".
- a supralinear stroke
- a supralinear dot for the vowels
- an optional set of ligatures
- punctuation marks
- a set of diacritical marks that are commonly used for philological  
publications, sublinear dots, brackets etc.
- keyboard layout consistent with free academic fonts like Coptic  
IFAO_Copte and IFAO_Grec

I already made scans of several documents, and a set of glyphs that I  
cut out from the documents and organized by letter/ligature, they only  
have to be traced, and "programmed"

As soon as we have a prototype, I could send it to some academic  
journals. I would have the opportunity to suggest the font for  
publication already this summer and hopefully I can promote with the  
other five scholars in the field.

Thanks in advance,

Vincent


Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

e:	info at vincentwj.nl
w:	www.vincentwj.nl
t:	+31628639123




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