[XeTeX] A typography question

[Thomas Thackery]

Regarding the IPA characters, DejaVu serif and sans serif both have  
codepoints in the IPA range. Attached are screenshots of the typefaces  
at the beginning of the IPA range.

Best,
Thomas Thackery


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On Aug 2, 2009, at 20:27 , Mike Maxwell wrote:

I know zip about fonts.  We're creating some books that have lots of  
IPA characters (and some other Roman characters with diacritics), as  
well as Arabic (Nasta'liq and now Naskh).  So it would be nice to  
choose fonts that go together harmoniously.

The need for IPA coverage rules out a lot of fonts.

We've been using the Charis SIL font for our Roman serif font, DejaVu  
Sans for our Roman sans serif font, and Nafees Nastaleeq for Nasta'liq.

Sans serif is used exclusively in section and chapter titles.  Charis  
doesn't exist in a sans serif font; is the Deja Vu sans font a  
reasonable match?  If not, would it be better to use the Deja Vu serif  
font in place of Charis, or conversely is there a sans serif font that  
is a better match for Charis?

There's not much choice among Nasta'liq fonts, but for standard Naskh  
there are of course lots of choices.  We do need to typeset Pashto,  
for which some of the Unicode code points are not standard Arabic  
characters; so I suppose there might be some Arabic fonts that  
wouldn't have those characters.  But apart from that issue, does one  
try to match an Arabic (Naskh) font to a Roman font?  Or do we just  
look for an Arabic font that is "pretty"?
-- 
   Mike Maxwell
   What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
   --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist