On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

This is a thing I've been working on again today.



I'm still trying to make up my mind about upgrading from the software I've been using for this, Typetool 3, to FontLab 7. The makers of the software have a sale running until...midnight tonight, I guess?

Yes, this is one hobby among many for me right now...and I'm uncomfortable about closing this door.

Over the past weekend, a lot of stuff got done. The decorations were all stowed away in anticipation of December 2014, housecleaning and cooking were committed with malice aforethought, TV shows were watched with abandon. In short, all the normal post-Christmas stuff that you’d expect to get done was done.

However, there was one unexpected project that got underway, with no resorting to Indiegogo or Kickstarter to get the funding underway at all. To be honest, I can’t be bothered because that would mean worrying about financial paperwork.

The project started out in the Omniglot forum on Facebook. Omniglot is a website devoted to keeping track of the world’s written and spoken languages, and it’s been around for a few years. Each language known to the operators of Omniglot has its own page explaining its writing system – alphabet, abadjad, syllabic, ideogrammatical – and showing it in action in a few phrases, with links to more specialized pages. There are sections devoted to constructed languages as well as to more accidentally evolved ones. Klingon is on the same footing as Khmer.

Anyway. It has a Facebook forum where its participants and fans can congregate to discuss issues of interest. I’m a member of that forum, and that’s how I fell into this project.

A person going by Tôn Thất Chương was looking for help in creating a font and keyboard layout for his designs for an alternative alphabet for the Vietnamese language. He calls his alphabet “Chữ Việt Trí” – I am most likely mangling the pronunciation as I speak both his name and that of his proposed alphabet – and after some discussion, I agreed to try my hand at this.

I had a couple of reasons for agreeing to this, despite not insisting upon any payment at all. One is my possession of a copy of TypeTool 3, a program for designing fonts. I have been in want of excuses to practice with Typetool for some years now, and this was a good one.

Also, the idea of adding to the diversity of the world’s writing systems appeals to me. Helping at least one language divorce itself from the Latin alphabet would be a challenge in its own right. Whether I succeed or not, at least I’ll have put some honest effort into that project.

It’s only been three days since I agreed to this, and I’ve been working on this in between house chores, job applications, and other distractions. The font – at least my first attempt – is going to have more akin with cuneiform and sans serif typefaces such as Helvetica, Arial, Univers and News Gothic than with anything written by brush in any of the writing systems already in use in southeastern Asia. That much, I regret. But my skills are not in the right league just yet, and learning how to do this was the point of agreeing to do this.

More as it develops…