Skeena Indigenous Typeface
20 days ago
- #typography
- #indigenous-languages
- #unicode
- Skeena Indigenous is a font family designed to support indigenous languages of North America, prioritizing their orthographic and typographic norms.
- The font originated from a design by Paul Hanslow and John Hudson for Microsoft, later adapted for indigenous language support.
- Skeena Indigenous is released under the Open Font License v1.1, encouraging community engagement and derivative works.
- The font supports a wide range of indigenous alphabets, including phonetic representations, diacritics, and unique characters like superscript modifier letters.
- Unicode encoding is presumed, though some communities may still use legacy encodings, requiring careful handling of character mappings.
- The project addresses confusable characters (e.g., apostrophe-like signs, colon-like signs) to ensure clarity in indigenous orthographies.
- Skeena Indigenous includes localized glyph variants (e.g., ogonek forms, barred letters) tailored to specific language preferences.
- The font supports both decomposed and precomposed diacritics, accommodating diverse encoding practices across indigenous languages.
- Kerning is emphasized for proper spacing, especially for irregular glyph shapes like superscript letters or numerals used as letters.
- The project aims to be a model for indigenous language font development, with potential for forks to support additional languages or regions.