Hello there…
So I’m now a bit confused about the caron accents. (And I say this while studying Radek Sidun’s book “Manual of Diacritics”)
I mean caron has a different shape as Uppercase letter, than in lowercase form?
Aren’t these glyphs, not the “commacent”-s? (I mean for example: tcaron as tcomma)
What should I do? How should I generate them?
And commacentcomb is made from the comma glyph?
Can someone help me with this? I’m quite confused about that.
Caron has indeed a different shape for lowercase letters. If you name it caroncomb.alt, Glyphs will automatically prefer it when generating glyphs. Look at fonts from e.g. Typotheque there is a great variety of styles to see how it’s done.
Commaaccent can be made from a comma, but it also can be too large then. Some designers make it smaller, some redraw it completely or even rotate it 90 degrees so that it doesn’t stick out too much. Again, look at fonts by reputable foundries, but preferably not too old—diacritics used to be a neglected topic.
There’s a tutorial coming up. You need the .alt variant of caroncomb for L (also smallcap), d, l, t. Make it distinguishable from quoteright, keep it above the x-height so it can fit over the crossbar of t, and put it real close to the stem. Composition is best done with the topright anchor.
Well, I’m always studying other fonts… (I mean it is the best proof… )
So then the solution is to make an alternate character for the “caroncomb” to generate the d l t-carons? That’s simple as I wanted to make them…
I’m done… It worked. I have just set the sidebearings and I guess it’s done.
The capital L also needs the vertical caron. And I believe the design should be less curly in general.
As Florian mentioned, I would recommend having a look at reputable foundries.
Typotheque comes to mind as a foundry run by somebody with an ľ
in his name. Here’s his own Greta Text:
Yes, these are awesome fonts… I’ve open often some typetogether-s and DTL-s fonts to proof. And yeah… I saw for example Bree is using a kind of apostrophe for these characters, which is less curly than the quoteleft.
Curl is OK but a bit harder to distinguish from quoteright.
There’s an article about it in the Insects Project book as well:
http://theinsectsproject.eu/
That pdf is very lovely! Thanks Erich…
To add a bit of a historical context, Czechs love(d) to fold their accents or write them after the letter. The caron seemed to have hard times finding its place through the years, and ended up being a half-caron or a small simplified comma (guessing, a shape that was close enough in the metal type cases).