On Friday, November 9, 2001, at 07:27 PM, Phillip Driscoll wrote:

>
> My candidate for the script which seems to have only pathetic fonts
> available is Cherokee. Hermann Zapf designed a really nice font for
> the University of Wisconsin about thirty years ago, but I don't believe
> it was ever used, and it's not available as a digital font.

A couple of years ago, I was chatting with some people from Monotype who
were in the process of designing a monospaced, sans serif, pan-Unicode
font for Unicode 3.0. Cherokee gave them headaches because they weren't
sure how many of the "decorations" on the letters were supposed to be
there or were just artifacts of the font design.

Both Cherokee and Deseret suffer from the fact that they were designed in
the early to mid-19th century when American typography was not exactly at
its best. I think as the pressure comes for type designers to include
*everything* in Unicode in their fonts, we may see some interesting
designs aesthetically acceptable in the 21st century. Maybe if Herr Zapf
has a few spare moments... :-)

Meanwhile, it *does* bring up an interesting problem in script analysis --
trying to determine what visual features of a writing system are truly its
essential characteristics and which are just artifacts of the way the
sample happened to be written.

==========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/