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Short URL: http://scripts.sil.org/Andika_Technical

Andika — Documentation

Annie Olsen, 2011-07-18; 14994 reads

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Table of Contents for this page:

    System requirements
    Features of the font
        Advanced typographic capabilities
        User-selectable font features
    Supported Character Ranges
        Private-use (PUA) characters

System requirements

The Andika font is designed to work on systems and with applications that provide support for TrueType fonts and for Unicode character encoding. This includes Microsoft Windows 9x or greater, as well as recent versions of the Mac OS (version 9.0 and later), and also some implementations of Unix / Linux (TrueType font support on Unix and Linux may depend upon the particular applications in use). On some systems (true, at least, of 32-bit Windows), it can also be used with older applications that use legacy, industry-standard, 8-bit character encodings.

The preceding characterization of system requirements describes the minimum needed to display characters. Realizing the full capabilities of this font involves additional requirements. This font is designed to work with either of two advanced font technologies, Graphite or OpenType. To take advantage of the advanced typographic capabilities of this font, you must be using applications that provide an adequate level of support for Graphite and OpenType.

Features of the font

Andika contains near-complete coverage of all the characters defined up through Unicode 5.1 for Latin and Cyrillic. In total, over 4,700 glyphs are included, providing support for over 2,100 characters as well as a large number of ligated character sequences (e.g., contour tone letters used in phonetic transcription of tonal languages).

In addition, alternately-designed glyphs are also provided for a number of characters for use in particular contexts. The glyphs are accessible in applications that support advanced font technologies, specifically the Graphite or OpenType technologies. These technologies are also utilized to provide automatic positioning of diacritics relative to base characters in arbitrary base+diacritic combinations (including combinations involving multiple diacritics).

Some important issues with respect to Unicode need to be borne in mind. Unicode is a character encoding and not a glyph encoding. Thus you should endeavor to use the character that reflects your character needs rather than finding a glyph that looks right and using its character code. Thus, for example, there is only one code for CAPITAL ENG (U+014A), although there are 4 different glyph shapes for this character in use around the world. Therefore it is necessary to use other means, such as user-selectable font features, to ensure that your document displays the right glyph for the character that you are anticipating. The advanced typographic capabilities mentioned above provide this very capability.

See also “How do I use a feature?”

Advanced typographic capabilities

This font supports various advanced typographic capabilities using the Graphite or OpenType font technologies.

• Automatic conversion of sequences of pitch letters (U+02E5..U+02E9 and U+A712..U+A716) into ligatures.
• Automatic fi-type ligatures.
• Auto placement of diacritics to a sufficient level of stacking.
• Auto placement of double-width diacritics (U+035C..U+0362) according to heights and depths of adjacent clusters (in Graphite only)
• Vietnamese diacritic placement handling (enabled via a user-selectable font feature).

The automatic placement of diacritics is supported for data that may or may not be canonically ordered (as defined by the  Unicode Standard). This should normally be the responsibility of application software and text-processing resources (such as input methods), however, and not the user.

These capabilities are available in any application that supports the Graphite technology. They are also available via the OpenType technology, though this requires applications that provide a sufficient level of support for OpenType features. (See System Requirements.)

TypeTuner Support: Andika, Charis SIL, Doulos SIL and Gentium — a typeface for the nations all have SIL TypeTuner support. They are also all available through the online SIL TypeTuner Web.

User-selectable font features

The document below can be downloaded in order to see all the user-selectable font features that are available in the font. The feature names, feature ids, settings and examples are provided. The document was produced with Graphite OpenOffice.

Font Features for Andika 1.0 Lorna A. Priest, 2011-04-27 Download "AndikaVariants1.0.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 489KB [382 downloads]

Because of the reduced character set, Andika Basic included only some of the font features in Doulos SIL and Charis SIL. However, Andika has all of the font features found in Charis SIL and Doulos SIL. It also has a few features not found in those fonts.

These features are exclusive to Andika:

Font features

TypeTuner legend: (All features are available for Graphite applications.)
R=glyphs are Reencoded (will work with dumb rendering); O=OpenType rules are activated; G=Graphite-only feature

Supported Character Ranges

This font supports over 2,100 characters from the Unicode 6.0 standard as well as over 229 Private Use Area (PUA) characters. In total, over 4,700 glyphs are included, supporting stylistic alternates for a number of characters as well as a large number of ligated sequences (e.g., contour tone letters used in phonetic transcription of tonal languages). The following character ranges constitute the list of characters supported by this font:

Supported Character Ranges

Private-use (PUA) characters

There are 230 private-use characters that are supported in this font. These conform to SIL International’s corporate registry for usage of the Unicode private-use areas. Characters which are not yet in Unicode are shown below.

Specials

Modifier Letters

Latin

Cyrillic

Deprecated SIL Corporate PUA characters Lorna A. Priest, 2012-02-07; 8205 reads

These PUA characters have been added to Unicode and are being deprecated. This page lists those PUA characters along with the appropriate Unicode codepoints. Please use the Unicode codepoint instead of the PUA codepoint. Our SIL Unicode Roman fonts will continue to support the PUA codepoint for backwards compatibility purposes.

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