Hungarian letters

Design
1

I’m trying to set up my typeface for the Hungarian alphabet but I don’t know how to “properly” add glyphs that don’t seem to have a Unicode: cs, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs. I’m sure this is documented but I can’t find it :-). Thanks!

2

Those would be ligatures: https://glyphsapp.com/tutorials/ligatures

But you don’t need to add them separately. Just make the g and y fit to each other properly, etc.

3

Hmm. Thanks for the reply. But any idea why dz, nj, ij, lj have their own Unicode?

4

For legacy and conversion reasons. They appeared in some old, deprecated encoding, and Unicode needs to be compatible with such encodings for round-trip conversions. All of these have their own history, but are not or hardly in use anymore.

Excuse my ignorance: What is really the problem with typing g, then y, for achieving ‘gy’? Is there a semantic difference? How would a gy digraph be different?

AFAIK Hungarian keyboards have no gy key. Sure enough, if you feel that these letters need to have a separate Unicode, you can start a discussion at Unicode.org. I doubt it will be accepted though, because g and y already exist in Unicode. The only way I see you have a chance is to prove that there was a Hungarian encoding in the eighties that assigned separate code points to these Hungarian digraphs, and that there is a significant electronic text library encoded with it that needs to be convertible to Unicode.

If you want to know more about Unicode, consider reading the Unicode tutorial, and reading one of the many books on the subject. I recommend Unicode Explained from O’Reilly.

5

I can only answer for ij: it is a diphthong in Dutch, and sometimes treated as one letter. It used to be on a separate key on Dutch typewriters, is written as one letter when putting words vertical (ex.
P
R
IJ
S
), and is still used as one letter in crosswords (ex. [P][R][IJ][S] )

6

Here’s the Unicode Consortium FAQ on Digraphs that explains some of the reasoning.

7

<<Excuse my ignorance: What is really the problem with typing g, then y, for achieving ‘gy’? Is there a semantic difference? How would a gy digraph be different?>>

Since this is my first adventure into designing a typeface, I want to be sure I’m doing things correctly for as many European languages as possible. My Polish fellow designer friend would never forgive me if I don’t get the kreska right :blush: So I’m diving in a bit deeper. I only speak broken French, and I certainly don’t extend to Hungarian, Slovak, or Dutch. My confusion comes from seeing glyphs for dz and ij but not gy. But if this is not a problem with Hungarians, then I’m satisfied and will let it go.

Thanks for all the support and the book recommendation! I’m ordering it now.

Learning. Always learning . . .