Sievphou Seksaa
Another Khmer TrueType typeface
Another Khmer TrueType typeface
Sievphou Seksaa means “schoolbook” and is a Khmer typeface whose design is roughly taken from a Khmer writing textbook. I thought the style was quite beautiful and I tried to capture the design as well as possible. The font is still in the making. I will expand this presentation and add more information during the development.
Update on Mai 15th, 2012: Up to now all the main characters and subscript letters are ready so far. Some independent vowel signs and most oft the dependent vowel marks are still missing. Also, I will do a lot of fine-tuning now, as some letters still look somewhat stiff and clumsy.
I have added the original type sheet below for reference.
Update on Mai 15th, 2012: Up to now all the main characters and subscript letters are ready so far. Some independent vowel signs and most oft the dependent vowel marks are still missing. Also, I will do a lot of fine-tuning now, as some letters still look somewhat stiff and clumsy.
I have added the original type sheet below for reference.
… well and this is what I have made out of it so far.
The most complicated part was to embed typographic features to the font. Since Khmer is a writing system with a lot of context sensitive shape-substitutions and rearrangements, there is a lot of work to do, not only to embed all the features that are necessary but also to arrange them in a correct order.
Since Apple’s MacOS doesn’t support OpenType Features completely (especially for the highly complex writing systems of South-East Asia there is little to no support), I had to rely on Apple’s own AAT features. It really took some time to figure out how the AAT engine works. This is especially true for the rearrangement and insertion features that I really had to rack the brains over!
Below is a chart of the most important substitions and rearrangements. There are some example letter clusters shown (they are just representative and have no sense at all) with the first line being the arrangement as typed in and the last line the final rendering. For better illustration I added a dotted circle for diacritical characters and dependend vowel or consonant signs, except for the last line.
Update on April 25th, 2013: After quite some time I did a bit of revision. Some characters needed a slight reshaping. Overall, the font is now considered to be ready. \o/
