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Charis SIL Font Documentation

NRSI staff, 2009-05-27; 14463 reads

‘I am grateful for the work you folks do.’

‘Thanks for making it easier for Mac and IBM users to communicate linguistically.’

Table of Contents for this web page:

    System requirements
    Features of the font
    Supported character ranges
    Conversion
    Keyboarding

System requirements

The Charis SIL font is designed to work on systems and with applications that provide support for TrueType fonts and for Unicode character encoding. This includes 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 was designed to work with any of three advanced font technologies, Graphite, OpenType or AAT. 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. At the time of release, no application supports all of the OpenType features of this font. Paratext 6 and Microsoft Office 2003 support many of the automatic ligatures as well as dynamic positioning of most diacritics. While Adobe InDesign 2/CS/CS2 does not offer support for dynamic diacritic positioning, it is one of the few applications to offer selection of alternate glyphs from OpenType fonts. There are currently few applications which make use of the Graphite capabilities of the font. These are WorldPad, a beta version of Mozilla, all applications in the FieldWorks Suite (such as Data Notebook) as well as a Graphite integration into OpenOffice.

Features of the font

The Charis SIL font contains near-complete coverage of all the characters defined in Unicode 5.1 for Latin and Cyrillic. In total, over 4,600 glyphs are included, providing support for over 1,900 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.

Advanced typographic capabilities

This font supports various advanced typographic capabilities using the Graphite, OpenType, or AAT 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, and the private-use character U+F17A) 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.) 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.

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 Charis SIL 4.106
Lorna A. Priest, 2009-10-27
Download "CharisSILVariants4.106.pdf", Acrobat PDF document, 1MB [2861 downloads]

AAT

This font includes AAT tables that provide limited diacritic placement, automatic ligatures, and selection of alternate glyphs in applications that fully support Unicode and Apple Advanced Typography. However, diacritic placement for arbitrary base+diacritic combinations may be less than ideal because of limitations in the AAT technology.

The user-selectable font features for choosing alternate glyph shapes are typically accessed via the Typography palette, available in applications such as TextEdit via a pop-up menu in the Fonts panel. (The user interface may differ in other applications, and not all of the user-selectable font features are supported in the AAT part of the font.)

Supported character ranges

This font supports over 1,900 characters from the Unicode 5.1 standard as well as over 229 Private Use Area (PUA) characters. In total, over 4,600 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:


C0 Controls and Basic Latin	U+0020..U+007E
C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement	U+00A0..U+00FF
Latin Extended-A	U+0100..U+017F
Latin Extended-B	U+0180..U+024F
IPA Extensions	U+0250..U+02AF
Spacing Modifier Letters	U+02B0..U+02FF
Combining Diacritical Marks	U+0300..U+0320, U+0323..U+033F, U+0346..U+036F
Greek and Coptic	U+0387, U+0393..U+0394, U+0398, U+03A9, U+03B1..U+03B4, U+03B8, U+03BB, U+03C0, U+03C3, U+03C7
Cyrillic	U+0400..U+045F, U+0462..U+0463, U+0472..U+0475, U+048A..U+04FF
Cyrillic Supplementary	U+0500..U+0525
Phonetic Extensions	U+1D00..U+1D7F
Phonetic Extensions Supplement	U+1D80..U+1DBF
Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement	U+1DC2, U+1DC4..U+1DCD, U+1DFE..U+1DFF
Latin Extended Additional	U+1E00..U+1EFF
General Punctuation	U+2000..U+2030, U+2032..U+203A, U+203C, U+203F, U+2040, U+2044, U+2053, U+2057, U+2060..U+2063, U+206A..U+206F
Superscripts and Subscripts	U+2070..U+2071, U+2074..U+208E, U+2090..U+2094
Currency Symbols	U+20A0..U+20B5
Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols	U+20E5, U+20EC..U+20EF
Letterlike Symbols	U+2116, U+211F, U+2122..U+2123, U+2126
Number Forms	U+2153..U+2188
Arrows	U+2190..U+219B, U+21A8, U+21D0..U+21D5
Mathematical Operators	U+2202..U+2206, U+220F, U+2211..U+2213, U+2219..U+221A, U+221E, U+222B, U+223C, U+2248, U+225F, U+2260..U+2261, U+2264..U+2265
Miscellaneous Technical	U+2308..U+230B, U+231C..U+231F, U+2329..U+232A, U+239B..U+233D
Control Pictures	U+2423
Geometric Shapes	U+25CA, U+25CC
Dingbats	U+2713, U+274D
Misc. Math. Symbols-A	U+27E6..U+27E7
Latin Extended-C	U+2C60..U+2C6F, U+2C71..U+2C7D
Modifier Tone Letters	U+A700..U+A71F
Latin Extended-D	U+A720..U+A735, U+A740..U+A741, U+A74E..U+A74F, U+A788..U+A78C, U+A7FB..U+A7FF
PUA: Specials	U+F130..U+F135
PUA: Combining Marks	U+F170..U+F176, U+F178..U+F17B
PUA: Modifier letters (e.g. superscripts)	U+F180..U+F182, U+F18B, U+F195..U+F1CE, U+F1D0..U+F1EA, U+F1F1..U+F1F9
PUA: Latin	U+F208..U+F26B
PUA: Cyrillic	U+F320..U+F32D
Alphabetic Presentation Forms	U+FB00..U+FB04
Variation Selectors	U+FE00..U+FE0F
Combining Half Marks	U+FE20..U+FE23
Arabic Presentation Forms-B	U+FEFF (zero-width no-break space)
Specials	U+FFF9..U+FFFD
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols	U+1D510, U+1D513

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

U+F130 FONT BASELINE AND SIDE-BEARING MARKER LEFT

U+F131 FONT BASELINE AND SIDE-BEARING MARKER RIGHT

U+F132 FONT VERTICAL METRICS MARKER LEFT

U+F133 FONT VERTICAL METRICS MARKER RIGHT

Combining Marks

U+F17B COMBINING ALMOST EQUAL TO BELOW

Modifier Letters

U+F1A1 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL AE

U+F1A3 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL REVERSED E

U+F1A4 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL CLOSED REVERSED OPEN E

U+F1AB MODIFIER LETTER SMALL O WITH STROKE

U+F1AD MODIFIER LETTER SMALL LIGATURE OE

U+F1AE MODIFIER LETTER SMALL CAPITAL OE

U+F1B4 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL CAPITAL Y

U+F1B5 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL RAMS HORN

U+F1BC MODIFIER LETTER SMALL H WITH STROKE

U+F1CD MODIFIER LETTER SMALL CAPITAL U BAR

U+F1CE MODIFIER LETTER SMALL TURNED Y

U+F1F1 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH ONE

U+F1F2 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH TWO

U+F1F3 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH THREE

U+F1F4 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH FOUR

U+F1F5 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH FIVE

U+F1F6 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH SIX

U+F1F7 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH SEVEN

U+F1F8 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH EIGHT

U+F1F9 MODIFIER LETTER PITCH NINE

Latin

U+F209 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SMALL TURNED ALPHA

U+F20D LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH STROKE AND HOOK

U+F225 LATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH PALATAL HOOK

U+F234 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH PALATAL HOOK

U+F235 LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH WITH PALATAL HOOK

U+F247 LATIN SMALL LETTER AT

U+F248 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER AT

U+F258 LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL I OVER SMALL SCHWA

U+F259 LATIN LETTER SMALL UPSILON OVER SMALL SCHWA

U+F266 LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH RETROFLEX HOOK AND BELT

U+F267 LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED Y WITH BELT

U+F268 LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL L WITH BELT

U+F269 LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED R WITH LONG LEG AND HOOK

U+F26B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED H

Cyrillic

U+F326 CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER GHE WITH STROKE AND DESCENDER

U+F327 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER GHE WITH STROKE AND DESCENDER

U+F32C CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER SHHA WITH DESCENDER

U+F32D CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER SHHA WITH DESCENDER

Deprecated SIL Corporate PUA characters Lorna A. Priest, 2009-10-12; 5361 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.

Conversion

In order to use this font with existing data that was created for use with fonts developed using the Encore Fonts system, or with custom-encoded fonts created by other means, 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:

Some TECkit mapping files have already been created for some of the more widely used SIL legacy fonts.

The Unicode 4.1 standard included 139 characters that were previously allocated to codepoints in the Private Use Area by SIL's PUA committee. The Unicode 5.0 standard includes 45 characters that were previously allocated to codepoints in the Private Use Area by SIL's PUA committee. The Unicode 5.1 standard includes 17 characters that were previously allocated to codepoints in the Private Use Area by SIL's PUA committee.

All processes (input methods, mappings) that create Unicode data should be revised to generate the proper Unicode values instead of PUA codes.

If you have data that contains these PUA codes, it should be updated by replacing each PUA character with its official Unicode counterpart. This will facilitate data interchange and the use of standard fonts and software.
SIL PUA to Unicode 5.1 Mapping is provided for converting your data.

Keyboarding

The ability to obtain full benefits of this font is also dependent upon having means for Unicode character input. This package does not include keyboard input methods. Most current operating systems provide keyboard input methods for a number of different languages that have writing systems based on the Roman or Cyrillic scripts. Various means may be available for different operating-system platforms to create additional input methods for other languages. Some of these are listed here: Some tools and resources for character input.