Diacritics (tone marks) for Chinese pinyin transcription about eb-garamond HOT 15 OPEN

[I suppose, typing pinyin is done in the order (consonant) vowel (tone) (consonant), right?]
What you see in "Tàizōng" is a kerning issue. What happens is that the combination "Ta" gets kerned, regardless of combining diacritics following thereafter (this doesn’t happen with precomposed letters, therefor typers of european languages hardly see this issu). I’ll add contextual kerning so this won’t happen.
It’s the first time I hear of tone diacritics having to be contrastless. Do you have some sources for this? At least what I find here (I know, WP isn’t necessarily a reliable ressource) such requirements are bad typography due to past restrictions. Wherever I read about pinyin, it simply said that the tone marks are the diacritics which you are using.

from eb-garamond.

@georgd Yes. Sometimes the tone mark falls on the second vowel of a diphtong (e.g. zuǐ), in which case I have not seen any problems at all.

What you say about the tone marks is both news and a great relief to me! I was afraid I would have to do a lot of rewriting at some point to get the right diacritics, but I'm sure the Wikipedia article is correct in saying that it was not a requirement but merely a side effect of technological constraints in the past. I quickly looked around at http://pinyin.info/ as well, which I know is a reliable scholarly resource, also without finding any mention of contrastless diacritics. So please disregard my comment on contrastless diacritics, as it stemmed from ignorance.

from eb-garamond.

I’m glad that you resolved the doubts on the diacritics’ shapes.
I’ll fix the kerning as soon as I can.

from eb-garamond.

@logofili I’ve started some work on this. It’s just a rough thing at the moment. You can test this font: www.georgduffner.at/ebgaramond/fonts/EBGaramond12-Regular.otf
To test the kerning triplets, it would be great to have real life samples. Could you by chance provide some? I think, the most interesting are groups involving "T" and "f".

from eb-garamond.

I wrote these words which are all actual syllables in Chinese:

Do I dare inquire about italics?

from eb-garamond.

Thank you! I’ve worked a bit on T+i+diacritic. The updated fontfile is at the same link.
I’ll do the italics too, but it may take longer. Please be patient.

from eb-garamond.

@logofili may I ask you which program you use for typesetting pinyin? What happens when you type the siyllable Tì with EBG?

from eb-garamond.

I write in XeLaTeX just typing in each diacritic as a I go along using U.S. Extended Keyboard in Mac OS.

from eb-garamond.

ok, thanks!

from eb-garamond.

Well, despite Pinyin use acute accent to represent tone 2, the style of writing is reverse than general handwriting, the typographic glyph looks too. Many Chinese dictionaries or textbooks using Pinyin (espesially in PRC) have this glyph, additionally, letter a in this case looks like “script a” (as of U+0251). I suggest you should add alternate glyph for Pinyin.

Here is the official scheme of Pinyin, which is include as a appendix in Chinese dictionaries such as Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (现代汉语词典, Xìandài Hànyǔ Cídǐan).

Here is some glyphs taken from SimSun, the default Simplified Chinese typeface of Windows:

These glyphs are implenting by ā, á, ǎ and à. But in EB Garamond, I think, should be add as stylistic set.

from eb-garamond.

TODO

• add an acute.pinyin glyph.

from eb-garamond.

Personally, I disagree, and would prefer the acute accent to stay the same even when used in Pinyin romanization.

The choice of tone marks stems from Zhuyin (Bopomofo) where the strokes are written according to how the aural perception of tones are visualised. When written in Latin script they are supposed to follow the Latin-script rules.

In most fonts and typeset materials I have seen of Chinese origin—please correct me if I’m waylaid—the following holds true: in Chinese fonts where the focus is the hanzi the acute accent is heavier to the bottom, and conversely, in Western fonts where the focus is the Latin alphabet the acute accent is heaver to the top.

Please do note that there are other things that stand out with the Latin alphabet in the Chinese fonts, e.g. that the accents tend to be longer and more clearly slanted to the right or left, as well as more clearly differentiated letters.

I would say it depends on the target reader: to someone used to the Latin alphabet or to someone that is not. I would not expect people generally to choose EB Garamond as a font for the latter group.

Extra note 1 – certain vowels (ü and ê) have double diacritical marks when tone marks appear:

• ê̄ – Wiktionary: ê̄
• ế – Wiktionary: ế
• ê̌ – Wiktionary: ê̌
• ề – Wiktionary: ề
• lǖ – Wiktionary: lǖ
• lǘ nǘ – Wiktionary: lǘ nǘ
• lǚ nǚ – Wiktionary: lǚ nǚ
• lǜ nǜ – Wiktionary: lǜ nǜ

Extra note 2 – certain consonants (m and n) can take tone marks as well:

• m̄ – Wiktionary: m̄
• ḿ – Wiktionary: ḿ
• m̀ – Wiktionary: m̀
• ń ńg – Wiktionary: ń ńg
• ň ňg – Wiktionary: ň ňg
• ǹ ǹg – Wiktionary: ǹ ǹg

Extra note 3 – apparently ng may be written ŋ as well (but I cannot recall ever having seen this out in the wild):

• ŋ́ – Wiktionary: ŋ́
• ŋ̌ – Wiktionary: ŋ̌
• ŋ̀ – Wiktionary: ŋ̀

from eb-garamond.

TBH, I always do the acute accents bottom up in handwriting — without any meaningful knowledge of Chinese :D

I see this in the same category as the T_h and similar ligatures and the single story a and g. Definitely not a priority and more on the 0layful side.

It's curious that no linguist has invented a right half caron combining diacritic yet 😉

from eb-garamond.

OpenType have a language tag for this, which would possible to make it accessible as locl feature.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/languagetags

from eb-garamond.

I definitely won't implement this as locl feature. Instead a cvXX or ssXX would do. The reason is: this is not a language/region specific requirement but rather a design variation. If implemented as a locl variation it is hard to switch it off without putting the user into difficulties — they wouldn't be able to correctly tag the text language.

from eb-garamond.