My-Lan Thuong While there is a trend for more international and diverse type design with the emergence of more and more multi-script type families, I was wondering what could also be done to support as many Latin languages as possible. The question of what is included in the character sets is recurrent and at the foundation of any typeface project, yet there is no clarity and little questioning about them. We often take for granted the standards (ASCII, Latin-A or B, etc.) but how relevant are they in terms of language support? As a French person, I need more than the base uppercase and lowercase alphabets to write correct sentences, but luckily, the necessary accented characters are almost always included, and with their own Unicode.
Yet, beyond European languages, there are many Latin-script-based languages that don’t have correct support, like Vietnamese, North American Indigenous languages, and most Sub-Saharan African languages, to name the few we (at Sharp Type) focused our attention on. This gap in representation concerns hundred of millions of people! I am not an expert in those languages, yet I would like to share the research I did, to spotlight this topic. I encountered other similar initiatives worth highlighting and collaborated with experts to add an « onmilatin » support to our latest releases, Sharp Earth and Sharp Serif. I would like to show the special characters design and the technical combining marks system that made it possible.
This presentation is an invitation to type designers to think about the international use of the fonts we produce and how we could improve the transcription of underrepresented languages.