On Sep 29, 2008, at 10:31 PM, Mark Swindell wrote:
Devin,
Thanks for the link. I'm actually after something that I think may
not exist. It would be similar in function to an IPA font, but with
regular English character pairs whose kerning would be reduced so that
they would represent a single visual unit, mirroring how they
represent sound. "Good" would be "G oo d" and "shallow" would be "sh
a ll ow." It would require tweaking the kerning between digraph
letter pairs and dipthongs to tighten them up, while keeping regular
spacing between these double letters, single letters, and words.
I'm not sure it's worth the trouble to create, but in teaching I find
that some children have a difficult time seeing that "sh" for example,
is not "s h" but rather its own phonetic unit. (A parallel: until
fairly recently, "ch" was the fourth letter of the Spanish alphabet,
though it was never represented with tighter kerning... I think the
Real Academia might have done away with that one, as well as the "ll",
at least for purposes of alphabetizing. (Wikpedia: In 1994, it ruled
that the Spanish consonants CH (ché) and LL (elle) would hence be
alphabetized under C and under L, respectively, and not as separate,
discrete letters, as in the past.)
The idea was to be able to present text to kids written with these
combinations emphasized while retaining a somewhat natural look.
Mark,
Clever idea, but you're probably right--it seems unlikely that someone
would have created such a specialized font. I guess if I were going to
do something similar I'd use color or style differences to show the
letter combinations. Or I supposed you could use Photoshop or some
other tool that will let you play with the kerning. Of course with PS,
you're stuck with only the words you create beforehand.
This is a place where the old Mac compressed font style would come in
handy!
Devin
Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University
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