New font for use in the Chimwiini language

ibanaham · June 9, 2019, 1:51pm

Greetings to all community members,

I have recently been looking for someone to help me create a font for the Chimwiini (Bravanese) language. Unfortunately it still does not exist. I have found the ‘Amiri font’ created by Khaled Hosny to be the most suitable font to adapt to suit the Chimwiini script. He has allowed the font community to adapt his font to suit their needs.

Attached please find the Chimwiini alphabet. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Hamid

bobby · June 10, 2019, 3:08pm

Are any of the fonts at software dot sil dot org / arabicfonts suitable? If not, please let us know how the fonts could be improved.

ibanaham · June 10, 2019, 3:33pm

The Schererazade would be a suitable font I guess. Just out of curiosity, is it not possible to adapt the ‘Amiri font’?

Lorna · June 10, 2019, 3:34pm

Scheherazade has all the characters you need for this language:
https://software.sil.org/scheherazade/

We also hope to release a new version of Harmattan (https://software.sil.org/harmattan/) that will support all the characters you require. We do not yet have a release date for the new version of Harmattan.

Lorna · June 10, 2019, 3:45pm

Amiri is under an the Open Font License and in a Github repo so it could be modified by someone other than the author. However, we do not have the resources to do it. You might consider going to the Github home for Amiri and creating an issue requesting for the author to update his font to include these characters. The home is here: https://github.com/alif-type/amiri. It appears to be in active development.

ibanaham · June 10, 2019, 7:05pm

Thank you for your response. I checked the Scheherazade font. The Arabic glyphs are there but unfortunately many of them are only in the ‘isolated form’. The initial, medial and final forms have not been added.

ibanaham · June 10, 2019, 7:09pm

I will do that. Thanks.

bobh · June 10, 2019, 10:40pm

All the contextual forms should be in Scheherazade. What ones are not showing up for you? What operating system and application are you using?

Lorna · June 11, 2019, 10:09pm

I believe that Windows 10 only supports Arabic characters through Unicode 7.0 (I just tested and even Unicode 8.0 characters are not supported). These characters were added to Unicode 9.0. Your options on rendering support are very limited. You main Word processing option is LibreOffice, and for browsers you will need Firefox or Chrome. This page lists some applications and which levels of Unicode they support: https://software.sil.org/arabicfonts/support/application-support/

Unfortunately you will be limited in application (and font) support until more people choose to implement these characters. At SIL we are trying to make them work in as many places as possible, but it is currently limited.

ibanaham · June 13, 2019, 9:21am

I understand. Thank you for your response. Do you know any other designer outside of SIL who maybe able to help?

Lorna · June 13, 2019, 4:15pm

As I mentioned above, there are at least two things that need to happen.

Fonts need to support your characters and connecting with the Amiri designer is a good step for you to do.
Even if fonts support the characters, applications must support the shaping and that is currently quite limited. We have no control over that. You can lobby different vendors (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe) to get them to update their support for Arabic script to the latest versions of Unicode.

Chimwiini_Baraawe · October 3, 2023, 7:16am

Hi Hamid, I hope you are well, there is already chimwiini alphabet. I think you’re better off using Latin characters. https://www.chimwiini.com/

chimwiini alphabet: Chimwiini Alphabet