Though the Noto Khmer fonts do not contain ligatures for every consonant with -aa and -aq, any design with the dipped centre in the letters’ hair will need a ligature glyph in the font (this is actually most Khmer fonts). Note in the current build of Glyphs, Lao ໜ and ໝ have the property ‘ligature’ which prevents the mark feature from including them (it only builds combinations from ‘letter’ category bases). I consider conjuncts to be pure consonant-consonant combinations, and ligatures to be anything else, so they could be consonant-consonant-vowel, consonant-mark, numeral-mark, punctuation-mark, or anything else. These are basically any precomposed things, either made from components or drawn afresh if the consonant or ligature is a different form from the components. These can occasionally take diacritic marks, so perhaps they belong in a group of their own rather than bundled in here. Then we see Burmese and Khmer have independent vowels, and I’d keep these separate from the alphabetic letters, since nobody would list them as part of the alphabet. Keeping vowels and marks in the same group means seems a good idea to me, as these are all dependent (needing to have a base) and need to be treated similarly at the engineering stage (being ignored or included in cluster shaping). Indeed some of these glyphs are made of spacing and nonspacing components (e.g. This is the most tricky thing to figure out a system for, as there are a number of different things in here.įirst we have two kinds of dependent vowels: spacing letters (see the difficulty with ‘letters’, we did discuss calling these ‘signs’ but I don’t know what other options we have) in pre-base or post-base positions, and then nonspacing diacritics (to my mind these are also ‘letters’) which go above or below, and are often used in combination with the spacing dependent vowel letters. Some Khmer designs (not the Noto Sans here) will also need sub2 versions of the below-base subconsonants which would be smaller versions of the normal ones, to be used when there’s more than one mark below the baseline. Lao signLo and nyoVowel should also really go in this class, since they derive from below/post-base consonant forms, despite the Unicode names.
I’ve heard ‘sub’ used for the Khmer below-base consonants and ‘subjoined’ is the term in Burmese. Medials and subjoined (medials only for Burmese) I don’t call these ‘letters’, since to my mind some other things (see below) are also letters, and ‘consonants’ is more definite and less ambiguous. I tend to use the same kind of glyph groups for all the Southeast Asian scripts, and I think it would be good to organise them all along similar lines. Thanks Rob, this is looking like a very good start! Others - I’d keep these for punctuation marks.
#Khmer dotted font plus#
Numerals - Khmer has its own numeral digits 0-9, plus special divination lore numerals 0-9, each with its own specific glyph representation. Vowels in Khmer can be placed above, below, to the right or left, and combination of each direction around one base consonant. Although Khmer do use combining marks that behave just like latin diacritics, they function nearly the same way as vowels except the fact that they always appear above the base consonant (Which I think is universal in all Latin based scripts. Seperating the Mark from the Letter make sense in every context. They cannot be written or read without a base consonant. These vowels are called dependent vowels for this reason. All vowels in Khmer, called Marks in Glyphs app, need to attach to a consonant. Independent vowels are just seperate graphical representations of vowels that are rare, but commonly used in old words, Pali, Sanskrit, or special significant technical terms. In Glyphs app, Letters in Khmer are single character consonants and independent vowels. The Khmer script is divided into these sub categories Letters, Marks, Numerals, Others. Since writing Thai and Khmer is based on the same rules of consonant and vowel placement in Thai (almost identical with one key difference) basing the submenu on what is present for Thai makes total sense to type designers. Letters, Marks, Numerals, Symbols (for lunar dates), Punctuations, Others. I think implementing submenu for Khmer based on Thai submenu would make mose sense with some few additions.
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