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The typographic Times

 

[November 2007]
Diacritics Project: beyond standard Latin characters
by Filip Blažek

   

Diacritics Project“Unfortunately, not much information exists about designing the diacritics properly. Except for the excellent study written by Victor Gaultney and a few web pages, the available resources are scarce and incomplete. Since I consider well designed diacritics to be an integral part of a well designed typeface, I published a long article on diacritics in the 10th issue of the Typo magazine few year ago. I decided to utilize the data collected for the article from literature and from discussions with professionals to build a web page; it offers information about the right shape, size and position of proper accents. Perfect model for such information-based web page seemed to be the Wikipedia encyclopedia, which may be altered by anyone and at any time.

Diacritics ProjectWeb pages of the Diacritics project contain an overview of accents used in European languages which use the Latin script. Each mark contains the information about its history, its use and its proper design. The table contains additional information, such as the list of languages which use the accent, its Unicode index, or its postscript name. Clicking on one language takes you to a page with information on the given language and with a link to the gallery. Gallery consists of commented examples of proper and wrong diacritics and there are also some examples of the historical development of accents.

Diacritics ProjectEditing is quite simple. After clicking on the editing link, each registered user (the registration is free) is taken to the editing mode. Even without the knowledge of HTML code, it is easy to change, add, or delete the information. You may also add photographs or images and in the future, there will be a discussion forum. The system is, of course, protected against abuse; if someone deletes the information malvolently, it will be returned from the backup files.”


Website: Diacritics Project