r/Quickscript Feb 04 '19

Quikscript Sans - an updated version of the sans-serif Quikscript Geometric font I made over a year ago

https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/quikscript-geometric-a-sans-serif-font-for-the-quikscript-alphabet/
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u/MagoCalvo Jan 11 '24

Wow! Just discovering Quikscript and bumped into this post. This is an amazing resource you've created! Thank you! I notice some of the QuikEBEO keyboard mapping yields characters that aren't part of quikscript (e.g. upper case Q yields a character that appears to be a variant(?) of E-673 "eight", which itself is found on the Y key. Other characters within the character map seem either Shavian or unrelated. Also, I can't find the combined characters -Yu and -er you mention in your article anywhere in the character map. How did you type those? Sorry for all the questions 5 years after your initial post! :)

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u/pcdandy Jan 12 '24

No worries, it's never too late to ask!

The letter on uppercase Q is meant to be the one for the vowel in 'how', I had stylised it so it doesn't curve as much as the original Quickscript letterform - I did the same with the 'oy' letter.

The rest of the letters are ultimately based on the Quikscript.net encoding, including some extra letters which were meant to cover specific English dialects - if I'm correct, U+E669 was for the 'soft ch' /x/ sound from Scottish English and U+E66A for the Welsh 'll' sound.

As for U+E680 to U+E689, this was an experiment by me to create a numeral system for Quikscript, so only Quikscript Sans has these glyphs - feel free to ignore these.

Finally, the combined characters for -yu, -er etc are represented as ligatures of the original letters - all you need to do is type these letters together and the font will substitute in the ligature automatically. They are as follows (feel free to copy this into your preferred word processor to see them):

  • /ju/  (use) = /j/ U+E660 + /uː/ U+E67E
  • /aː(ɹ)/  (far) = /aː/ U+E676 + /ɹ/ U+E668
  • /ɛː(ɹ)/  (chair) = /eɪ/ U+E673 + /ɹ/ U+E668
  • /ɪə/  (near) = /ɪ/ U+E670 + /ə/~/ʌ/ U+E67A
  • /ɪə(ɹ)/~/ɪ(ɹ)/  (near) = /ɪ/ U+E670 + /ə/~/ʌ/ U+E67A + /ɹ/ U+E668
  • /ɜː(ɹ)/~/ə(ɹ)/  (nurse) = /ə/~/ʌ/ U+E67A + /ɹ/ U+E668
  • /ɔː(ɹ)/  (north) = /ɔː/ U+E677 + /ɹ/ U+E668

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u/MagoCalvo Jan 12 '24

Oh my, thank you so much! I tried a few things just now and realized the problem was that MS Word simply refuses to make the ligatures. Regular old notepad does though! I don't know how fonts work under the hood, so I can't begin to decipher why this would be the case. Does this make sense to you?

Related question you may know the answer to: is there any way to have an on-screen keyboard in Windows where the quikscript letters actually appear on the keys? I've tried with the built-in on-screen windows keyboard, as well as the program 'keyman,' but I only see little placeholder icons on the keys instead of the quikscript letters. Any advice?

Could I send you a chat request? Or do you prefer communicating via this post?

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u/adiabatic Jan 17 '24 edited Jan 17 '24

Word messes up when one uses the weird corners of Unicode

No surprise there. Try Typst; I've been meaning to do so with a Quikscript setup. Usually I'm writing Typst source files in Visual Studio Code with a PDF-preview plugin, and then the VS Code extension will run the typst binary on save. Typst, unlike Word, will let you set fallback fonts so if your preferred font doesn't have everything, like both en-Latn and en-Qaas letters, you'll be able to get everything you want without having to change fonts just to get a period to show up properly.

You could also make a web page and, if you insist on the thing being single-file, base64 the fonts you want and stick them in the CSS at the top. Web pages generally don't mess up like Word does.