D
Story
Making a font with ligatures to display thirteenth-century monk numerals
Submitted as a Show HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939312
Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems.

The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.

  • yorwba
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  • 33 minutes ago
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From the Script Ad Hoc Group: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2021/21016-script-adhoc-rept.pdf

"A project to digitize Cistercian manuscripts at Western Michigan University is not requesting the characters be in Unicode, so this is just an informational document. [...] We recommend the UTC make the following disposition: Notes this document (L2/20-290) but takes no further action."

For something to be added to Unicode, someone actually has to request it and shepherd it through the process.

My immediate thought was combining characters eg

  934 = CISTERCIAN STAFF + 
        COMBINING CISTERCIAN 900 +
        COMBINING CISTERCIAN 30 +
        COMBINING CISTERCIAN 4
Would require allocating (1 staff) + (9 digits) * (4 places) = 37 code points.

Were you thinking

  934 = CISTERCIAN 900 +
        ZWJ + 
        CISTERCIAN 30 +
        ZWJ +
        CISTERCIAN 4

?
I was thinking using ZWJ because the staff is always implied by the usage of Cistercian numerals. I was also wondering if we could reuse CISTERCIAN 1-9 for each significant digit rather than having to encode all 4 separately, though at the end of the day it’s only 36 separate code points.

Adding the staff is 37 codepoints versus 36, but I think using ZWJ would at least have each numeral independently renderable so it degrades gracefully. I’m not too sure about how combining characters degrade.

Essentially it boils down to whether you think the staff and the digit flag part of the numeral are independent or not.

Excellent! For a music project of mine I found MusGlyph [1] which is also all about ligatures, like typing ssss for 4 beamed sixteenth notes. There are some ligatures I need that are not in the font, I contacted the author and he encouraged me to add them myself. So now I’m spending quality time with FOSS called FontForge. Also subsetting a ligature-heavy font for the web turns out an interesting challenge. Wrote up my experience here [2]

[1] https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/ [2] https://highperformancewebfonts.com/read/subsetting-and-liga...

  • rjh29
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  • 3 days ago
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Surprising there isn't a better way to do it than defining 10000 ligature config lines and 10000 glyphs. I guess dynamic combinations of subglyphs are a Unicode level thing?
https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/FRBCistercian

There is a compositional approach, used by this font.

OP went with brute force because it's probably a heck of a lot easier up front, lol.

  • rjh29
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  • 5 hours ago
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Nice thanks. I guess this requires manual entry of glyphs, while the other one just works with arabic numerals.
This is lovely.

> Sometimes (not always), this makes addition visual

I wonder how often - my suspicion would be rarely.

Seems like it's only when adding 1 + 4, 6, or 8 in a place value or where one of them is 0. It doesn't seem like it'd ever hold across a carry, but I could be missing something.

Edit: There's actually a few cases with adding 2 as well!

Very cool use of a technology I wasn't even aware of!