I’m a complete beginner in font creation. I would like to have your views as to the most efficient way to create a font for Gregg shorthand.
What makes shorthand different from most other cases is that you have one symbol per sound, and in Gregg shorthand, those can be long/short horizontal straight lines, long/short diagonal lines, long/short upward/downward vertical/horizontal curves, etc. This creates an issue for ligatures, because all those symbols have to be attached to each other even though the end of a symbol and the beginning of the following one almost never rest on the same horizontal line.
This makes me think that the only way would be to create a glyph for every single word, like in Chinese, so that if you type, say, “associate” then only one glyph (the one transcribing “associate”) would appear.
And here is a little word list, when those individual symbols are attached to each other, with the exact positioning of the joinings being wildly inconsistent:
Did you check if there are Unicodes for shorthand already? I would start from there.
Then identify glyphs (reusable pictures) that make sense. You don’t need one per word. You can also use something called cursive attachment for connecting glyphs.
There is Unicode for Duployan shorthand, but only because it is also used to write the Chinook language. I have not found anything for Gregg shorthand, which is a different system.
Thanks for your pointer regarding cursive attachment. Do you know where I can find any details regarding this? I guess I understand the basics with the entry and exit anchors, but it seems much more complicated than that to make it work.
I was so thrilled to see someone trying to create a Gregg shorthand font. Was it ever completed?
Basically, there are symbols for individual, and groups of sounds, that can be joined together and some symbols are known as ‘short forms’ for commonly used words.
An example of joined sounds is the word ‘going’. In shorthand it is spelled as ‘gay-o-ing’. The sound called ‘gay’ is the ‘g’ sound, ‘o’ for the ‘o’ sound, then the symbol for the ‘ing’ sound (which is a period). A period in shorthand is a short back-slash. I would love to find a Gregg shorthand font!
