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

Abyssinica SIL Font Documentation

Lorna A. Priest, 2006-05-25; 5978 reads

Table of Contents for this web page:

    System requirements
    Samples
    Supported character ranges
    Private-use (PUA) characters supported by Abyssinica SIL
    Advanced typographic capabilities
    Conversion
    Keyboarding

System requirements

The Abyssinica SIL 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).

The preceding characterization of system requirements describes the minimum needed to display characters. Realizing the full capabilities of this font involves additional requirements. This first release of the font is designed to work with any of three advanced font technologies, Graphite, OpenType or AAT. Although standard use of the Ethiopic script does not require any of these smart font technologies, 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, OpenType or AAT. Microsoft Office 2003 supports dynamic positioning of most diacritics (but not U+135F ETHIOPIC COMBINING GEMINATION MARK) over the Ethiopic range (U+1200..U+135A) but not over Ethiopic Supplement or Ethiopic Extended characters. However, Microsoft Publisher 2003 does support dynamic positioning of U+135F ETHIOPIC COMBINING GEMINATION MARK. There are currently few applications which make use of the Graphite capabilities of the font. These include all applications in the FieldWorks Suite (such as Data Notebook and WorldPad) as well as a Graphite integration into OpenOffice 2.0.

Samples

Type samples showing some of the inventory of glyphs can be downloaded here. A sample from one page is shown below. For a complete list of characters included in Abyssinica SIL, see Supported character ranges, below.

Abyssinica SIL Type Sample
Lorna A. Priest, 2006-04-17
Download "AbyssinicaSILTypeSample.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 204KB [1031 downloads]

Abyssinica SIL Sample - Ethiopic syllables

Supported character ranges

This font supports 461 Ethiopic characters and over 241 Latin characters from the Unicode 4.1 standard, as well as over 125 Private Use Area (PUA) characters. In total, over 978 glyphs are included. The following character ranges constitute many of the characters supported by this font:


C0 Controls and Basic Latin	U+0020..U+007E
C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement	U+00A0..U+00FF
Latin Extended-A	U+0152..U+0153, U+0160..U+0161, U+0178, U+017D..U+017E
Latin Extended-B	U+0192
Spacing Modifier Letters	U+02C6, U+02DC
Combining Diacritical Marks	U+0300..U+0304, U+0307..U+0308, U+030B..U+030C, U+030F
Ethiopic	U+1200..137C
Ethiopic Supplemental	U+1380..U+1399
Ethiopic Extended	U+2D80..U+2DDE
General Punctuation	U+2007..U+200A, U+2013..U+2014, U+2018..U+201A, U+201C..U+201E, U+2020..U+2022, U+2026, U+2030, U+2039..U+203B
Superscripts and Subscripts	U+2070, U+2074..U+2079
Currency Symbols	U+20AC
Letterlike Symbols	U+2122
Geometric Shapes	U+25CC
Dingbats	U+2713
PUA	U+E021, U+E029, U+E031, U+E039..U+E043, U+E068..U+E06E, U+E070..U+E072, U+E200, U+E202..U+E205, U+E217, U+E227, U+E230..U+E236, U+E24F, U+E257, U+E25F, U+E26F, U+E290..E296, U+E2A8..U+E2AE, U+E2B7, U+E2BF, U+E2D7..U+E2DE, U+E2E7, U+E2F8..U+E2FE, U+E313, U+E318..U+E31F, U+E328..U+E32E, U+E338..U+E33F, U+E343, U+E34F, U+E380..U+E386, U+E400..U+E406, U+E408, U+E410..U+E416, U+E490..E494, U+E496, U+E498..U+E49A

Supported character ranges

Private-use (PUA) characters supported by Abyssinica SIL

PUA characters in the font are documented in SILEthiopicPrivateUseAreaBlock.pdf which is included in the font download as well as in a separate download here:

AbyssinicaSIL_PUA.pdf
Lorna A. Priest, 2006-04-17
Download "AbyssinicaSIL_PUA.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 185KB [1585 downloads]

If these PUA characters are ever incorporated into Unicode it is likely that we would release a new version of the font using both the new Unicode codepoints as well as the PUA codepoints.

Advanced typographic capabilities

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

Auto placement of diacritics (one level only) on Ethiopic syllables only (not on Latin characters)
Kerning of almost 200 pairs of Ethiopic syllables

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.) With AAT applications, only limited combinations of base characters and diacritics will work correctly; beyond the supported set of combinations, diacritic placement may be inferior.

A sample of diacritic placement and kerning is shown below:

Abyssinica SIL Sample - Diacritic placement and Kerning

Conversion

In order to use this font with existing data that was created for use with fonts developed using custom-encoded fonts, it is necessary to re-type or convert data to produce data that is encoded in conformance with the Unicode Standard. TECkit is one program that can be used for character encoding conversion. TECkit allows users to write their own custom conversion mappings.

The TECkit package is available for download from SIL’s TECkit Web site: TECkit.

Three TECkit mapping files (compiled and uncompiled) are available as a separate download (SIL-Ethiopia (Latin to Fidel) Unicode mapping). They are intended for use where text has been input “phonetically” as a syllable (be, ppii, etc.) and conversion to fidel is desired (, , etc.).

If you happened to obtain an early unreleased version of the SIL Abyssinica font, and used some of the Private Use Area (PUA) codepoints in your data, you may wish to use the PUA to Unicode mapping file) to convert your data from PUA codepoints to Unicode 4.1 (many of the PUA characters were added to Unicode 4.1).

Keyboarding

The ability to obtain the full benefits of this font is also dependent upon having means for Unicode character input. A package that includes a Keyman keyboard for use with Windows is available, as is a keyboard layout file for Mac OS X. See the download page.

Various other means may be available for different operating-system platforms to create additional input methods. For instance, Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator can be used for this purpose on Microsoft Windows. For the Mac, version 10.2 of Mac OS X includes a mechanism for users to create custom Unicode keyboard layouts (see http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2056.html).

Ge'ez Script Keyman Keyboards

The Ethiopic Unicode Resource Page