Glyph browser goes peculiar!

[William Overington]

I have just tried the version 238 beta and decided to try to find out if a previously reported problem over using the Glyph Browser has been fixed. Alas no, though even the very slight colour change seems to have gone.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/77847-glyph-browser-search-facility/

Yet I found a peculiar problem with the glyph browser.

I tied to search for the character h and just got a display with a subset of the characters that are in the font.

It looked peculiar but it suddenly occurred to me that each of the characters in the subset has a letter h in the character name of the glyph in the font.

Yet that only works for most of the top row. Once one gets to À (LATIN CAPITAL LETER A WITH GRAVE) that does not seem to be the rule.

I tried it with other letters such a j and q and the results are interesting.

William Overington

Monday 18 February 2019

 

[Joachim_L]

It appears to me, that this search is not meant to be for the glyph itself - which makes no sense for me, but for the description of it. Means searching for grave gives you all glyphs with a grave. Maybe else I did not understand your problem.

Edited February 19, 2019 by Joachim_L
Attached image

[walt.farrell]

From the Photo 1.6 Help:

Quote

• Search—Enter a Glyph value, a Unicode value or a text phrase to locate a Glyph or Unicode character. For example, "G+0131", "U+00b0" or the phrase "degree" will all show the degree symbol, respectively.

 

[William Overington]

@walt.farrell

Yes, yet that is orthogonal to this issue.

William

 

[William Overington]

@Joachim_L

Well, if one is looking for a letter h there seems nothing else that one can enter into the search bar but h on its own.

Maybe it was not anticipated that someone would do that, but there we are.

William

 

[Joachim_L]

Good point. In most cases I use the glyph browser in front of me (aka keyboard) for searching the h, when I want to type it into my layout.

 

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, William Overington said:

Well, if one is looking for a letter h there seems nothing else that one can enter into the search bar but h on its own.

If I select Arial and search for 'h' or 'H' (without the quotation marks) I get a long list of results beginning with 'Apostrophe', 'Left Parenthesis', 'Right Parenthesis', 'Hyphen-Minus' and 'Digit Three'. If I search instead for 'h{space}' I get 'Latin Capital Letter A With Diaeresis', etc, and if I search for '{space} h' I get 'Latin Capital Letter H', 'Latin Small Letter H', 'Latin Capital Letter F With Hook', etc. Searching for '{space}H{space}' seems to give me only H glyphs including accents or diacritics.

[William Overington]

33 minutes ago, Alfred said:

… . Searching for '{space}H{space}' seems to give me only H glyphs including accents or diacritics.

That makes sense as the Unicode name for an unaccented h would not have a space after the letter h in the description.

I have often found that as I like to include characters for Esperanto in my fonts, the issue of an h circumflex needs to be considered right from the start when setting out the metrics for the font. I have only once seen printed text where the circumflex accent above the h is at the same height as for a c circumflex, thus to the side of the ascender rather than above it.

I note that Polish uses a line through a lowercase l rather than try to have an accent above it. (also for uppercase)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language#Orthography

I am remined of the fact that the Arno font, by Adobe, had an end of line variant glyph for some characters, including h circumflex.

Yet where could such a glyph be used?

Inspired by this I wrote a poem which, when translated into Esperanto, allows such a glyph to be used at the end of each line, though there is then an issue of an apostrophe that is needed after each use of the h circumflex.

A soft and lingering echo
In the garden of a monk
Of a great and magnificent pibroch
Played before a monarch
 

I find it interesting that I wrote (in 2008) a poem in Esperanto inspired by the glyph complement of the Arno Pro Italic font. A poem that might well never have been written if the Arno Pro Italic font had not had the ending version of the Esperanto ĥ character.

A situation of typography inspiring creative writing.

William

 

[mac_heibu]

I fear, you don’t use a Mac, William, where it is that simple to use these kind of characters: Just hold the key down for a tiny moment and – voilà  :

 

 

[Alfred]

13 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

I fear, you don’t use a Mac, William, where it is that simple to use these kind of characters: Just hold the key down for a tiny moment and – voilà  :

William and I are both Windows users, so we have to resort to aids like this one: http://esperanto.typeit.org

[William Overington]

13 minutes ago, Alfred said:

William and I are both Windows users, so we have to resort to aids like this one: http://esperanto.typeit.org

I did not know about that. Thank you.

William

26 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

I fear, you don’t use a Mac, William, where it is that simple to use these kind of characters: Just hold the key down for a tiny moment and – voilà  :

 

 

Wow, you made that video specially for me. Thank you.

I also found it on YouTube.

William

 

[mac_heibu]

44 minutes ago, Alfred said:

William and I are both Windows users, so we have to resort to aids like this one: http://esperanto.typeit.org

No problem at all! Windows is not the source of evil!  I made this small screencast just in case, because I know, that most of Mac users don’t know about the existence of this feature.

[walt.farrell]

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

Yes, yet that is orthogonal to this issue

Actually, it's not. The "phrase" you can enter is part of the Unicode name of the character.

3 hours ago, William Overington said:

Well, if one is looking for a letter h there seems nothing else that one can enter into the search bar but h on its own

For that, consider that the complete name of "h" is "Latin Small Letter h" you could search for "letter h" or "small letter h" to avoid getting H instead.

For a more realistic one, suppose you wanted an e with a grave accent. Search for "letter e with grave" or "small letter e with grave".