Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 20:57 -0400 2005-08-13, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > >>>Your Ogham font I would not consider very useful,
> >
> > >>Why?
> >
> >>Well, the stemline is thicker than the strokes, which I find very
> > >offputting, not to say ugly and incorrect. Some Ogham fonts have no
> >
> >As if there were some hallowed tradition of how to represent Ogam with
> >type.
>
> As it happens, there is practice, if not "tradition" in Ogham font
> design. Brash's 1879 Ogam Inscribed Monuments of the Gaedhil uses
> Ogham fonts. I have studied Ogham typography, and I have made a
> number of Ogham fonts available. See
> http://www.evertype.com/celtscript/ogfont.html where eight Ogham
> fonts can be viewed. (There are ten Ogham fonts on the page, but
> Beith-Luis-Nion, Pollach, and Maigh Nuad are all based on the same
> design.)
>
> In your font, the primary weight is given to the stemline, not to the
> strokes making up the letters. The stemline is helpful in Ogham
> fonts, but it is the letters which are significant; the stemline
> itself is even optional. Either the strokes should be much thicker
> and bolder than the stemline, or it and they should have the same
> weight. It's perverse to give the stemline the primary emphasis.
>
> > > stemline at all; in any case the strokes are significant, the
> >> stemline not. Nevertheless I prefer my Ogham letters to have their
> >> stemlines drawn on either side of each letter, not the way that
> >
> >I don't know what that means. Ogam is carved on the edge of a stone.
>
> I'll be happy to explain what I mean. Typically, Ogham fonts with a
> stemline include bits of the stemline on either side of the letter
> -|||- so that the letters can join together.Your fonts don't, which
> means that you would have to type an inter-letter stemline in order
> to get the words not to run together. That means that you can't type
> Ogham text (in the sense of something you could search for correctly
> on the internet for example) with your font, because instead of
> searching for MUCOI you would have to search for M-U-C-O-I.

You're wrong. If you don't know what you're talking about, you shouldn't
talk.

> The Unicode encoding for Ogham assumes that each letter will have its
> stemline inherent in the font glyph so that the letters attach
> correctly; there is also an OGHAM SPACE MARK which would have the
> shape of a stemline can be used between words. On p. 344 of your
> book, you give spaces between the words; in ordinary typography I
> would set this with the OGHAM SPACE MARK, preferring
> QRIMITIR-RONANN-MAQ-COMOGANN to QRIMITIR RONANN MAQ COMOGANN. (Though
> of course in the context of p. 344 the word space helps the reader
> recognize the breaks, which is perfectly reasonable.)

I really don't give a damn what "The Unicode encoding for Ogham
assumes." It was not available to me at the time. Nowadays, anyone in
the world could reproduce much of the content of WWS with an
off-the-shelf OS. In 1993, that was not an option.

> > > you've done them. Your vowel signs in the Ailm series are better than
> >> many in that they are short; but I prefer notches to small strokes
> >> for these shapes. That's a question of taste.
> >>
> >> In the body of the article, I would say that the suggestion that
> >> Ogham texts are boustrophedon is simply incorrect. Ogham inscriptions
> > > may begin on one side of a stone, go up over the top and down the
> > > other side, but that is still as single line of text. It is not
> > > boustrophedon.
> >
> >Did you notice who wrote the article? Do you consider yourself a greater
> >expert?
>
> Of course I noticed who wrote the article. When I prepared Irish
> Standard 434
> (http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/is434.pdf) and the
> submission for Unicode encoding of Ogham I consulted with him about
> the letter names. Damian is, however, incorrect in his use of the
> word boustrophedon here, and I would have no problems telling him so.
> A boustrophedon text has a line-break where the directionality of the
> text is reversed. That isn't the case in Ogham. As I said, a text may
> begin on one side of a stone, go up over the top and down the other
> side, but that is still as single line of text. There is no
> line-break -- no field-ploughing, so to speak -- so boustrophedon is
> not the correct term.
>
> I would also query Damian's description of the arrowhead as a "word
> separator". Typically, the arrowheads are used more or less
> decoratively on either end of a word or phrase.
>
> And yes, I consider myself an expert on Ogham. I do not venture to
> compare myself with Damian, but I have no problem disagreeing with
> him where he appears to be imprecise or in error.

And have you published your great insights in, say, a journal of Celtic
studies?
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...