A printing (rather than handwriting) alternative to Andika

SIL Fonts
1

As modern websites and mobile phones increasingly adopt sans-serif rather than serif fonts, an open-source sans-serif font that supports advanced typography (OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography and Graphite) like Andika but with a printing (rather than handwriting) look could be very valuable. In particular, it could benefit my project Phonetically Intuitive English ( sites.google.com/site/phoneticallyintuitiveenglish/) which relies on fonts that support advanced typography to render combining diacritics well on major platforms (e.g. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux).

2

There are many sans-serif fonts that already support OpenType with a rich character set. Many native OS fonts provide good support. Noto Sans may also be a good option. Graphite and AAT support are much less common - even Andika no longer supports them as OpenType reasonably meets all known Latin-script needs.

3

Perhaps my ideal font has three aspects:

(1) Sans-serif;
(2) Open source;
(3) Supports major advanced typography (OpenType, AAT, Graphite) to render combining diacritics well.

In Windows, Calibri is a sans-serif that renders combining diacritics almost perfectly, but some diacritics like “Combining Left Half Ring Above” are rendered too small (a common problem in fonts for less common diacritics), so I need an open source font so I can modify the vector graphics of these diacritics.

I remember I tried Noto Sans but it has its own rendering issues with diacritics.

Anyway, I think a sans-serif, printing-look font can be a good direction for SIL Fonts (can be modified from Andika). It’s the mainstream in modern (mobile and online) computing.

4

I just tried the latest Noto Sans downloaded from Google and it looks very promising with my Phonetically Intuitive English browser extension. I can’t post a screenshot but you can remove the space in the following link to check it out:

https:// i.postimg.cc/KZdhts0D/usaf.png

Noto looks like a great unified effort to make an open-source advanced font family. And if there are any diacritics not rendered well, it’s possible to modify it as it’s open source and SIL Open Font License based.