Thuum.org

A community for the dragon language of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Thuum.org

A community for the dragon language of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Unicode Dragon Font and Keyboard Layout

 1 

vestibule
March 11, 2020

I modified the dragonscript font to be in the unicode Private Use Area, and made a keyboard layout for it. (I wanted dragon runes in a text file, is why).

Keyboard layout image: https://i.imgur.com/mcQvGaj.png

Download links:
font: https://mega.nz/#!XrxwECwQ!1uHTIl75QH0D3y5D1m9GJ4CKm6RTYY7TkBWpC44vvx8
keyboard layout: https://mega.nz/#!uyhkhajQ!KljJ6r_LmYlzxMlvtEmBn8j4l_qI0yvRpcaYVRWIW0E

fontforge file: https://mega.nz/#!f7xURCQQ!bCYMwRupe115wNW8JUmnPx-ZHKu7sR0sOonnzzHr05g
keyboard layout source file: https://mega.nz/#!P3oQjADY!DJJEc-L7EUj6OPBs0tbo-nRdnidRQMqJyAvlCKff8Fo

I will post a rationale below, in case anyone wants to change or improve this, or wants to know what decisions I made.

by vestibule
March 11, 2020

I modified the dragonscript font to be in the unicode Private Use Area, and made a keyboard layout for it. (I wanted dragon runes in a text file, is why).

Keyboard layout image: https://i.imgur.com/mcQvGaj.png

Download links:
font: https://mega.nz/#!XrxwECwQ!1uHTIl75QH0D3y5D1m9GJ4CKm6RTYY7TkBWpC44vvx8
keyboard layout: https://mega.nz/#!uyhkhajQ!KljJ6r_LmYlzxMlvtEmBn8j4l_qI0yvRpcaYVRWIW0E

fontforge file: https://mega.nz/#!f7xURCQQ!bCYMwRupe115wNW8JUmnPx-ZHKu7sR0sOonnzzHr05g
keyboard layout source file: https://mega.nz/#!P3oQjADY!DJJEc-L7EUj6OPBs0tbo-nRdnidRQMqJyAvlCKff8Fo

I will post a rationale below, in case anyone wants to change or improve this, or wants to know what decisions I made.


vestibule
March 11, 2020

The range is the randomly picked U+f140 - U+f161, letters only. The CSUR and Under CSUR says it's vacant -- not that it's really relevant, the whole PUA is avaiable for use.

Fontforge whined about the font's vector glyphs. Apparently those hurt the feelings of text rendering engines, whose complexity I hear is not enviable, so I spent a few hours fixing those while minimising visual alteration as much as I could.

On the keyboard layout: dragon runes have no capitalisation (just like futhark), so I use the latin lowercase keys for corresponding runes, and some of the uppercase forms for the extra letters. The rule is each vowel's long variant (aa, ey, uu, ii, oo) is in the shift+vowel key, and the phonetically more distant variants (ei, ur, ir) are right under them (under E is D, thus, ei is shift+D). The exception is ah, which I deem frequent enough to place on its throne at the empty lowercase c key (long live the new high king).

This allots ease of memory, rather than typing convenience. For example, the german keyboard does away with ;'- and left bracket and adds öäüß. This is fast and convenient to type, but german people also have the right glyphs painted on their physical keyboards. I don't have that luxury, and this keyboard layout will be rarely exercised in the practitioner's mind, thus mnemonics win. The downside to eg. shift+D being ei, is that when typing dein 'guard', you have to type D, shift+D, N, but this might be the only example in the canon word list.

I decided against filling in the shift+letter forms with just letter, because that maps a single letter twice (likely leading to confused and divergent typing habits), may lead to mistyping, and would make it inconsistent with shift+M meaning M, but shift+K meaning ir. I also didn't mix latin and dragon in the layout, because 34 letters are a lot, and losing either lower or upper case of latin will cripple all normal typing. The futhark layouts on the babelstone website resemble these decisions, but they might have had different reasons.

Nonetheless, the layout feels good enough for me, and it forces me to think of compound letters as a single whole, not as transcriptions pronounced.

I only made a windows keyboard layout, because the Xorg kb layout configuration (and the console, and the...) on linux can burn in hell.

I don't expect people to pick this up, but in case someone has the same needs as I, and doesn't feel like duplicating work for no reason, then they are welcome to use this.

Links:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339
https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/releases
https://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/
https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/
 

by vestibule
March 11, 2020

The range is the randomly picked U+f140 - U+f161, letters only. The CSUR and Under CSUR says it's vacant -- not that it's really relevant, the whole PUA is avaiable for use.

Fontforge whined about the font's vector glyphs. Apparently those hurt the feelings of text rendering engines, whose complexity I hear is not enviable, so I spent a few hours fixing those while minimising visual alteration as much as I could.

On the keyboard layout: dragon runes have no capitalisation (just like futhark), so I use the latin lowercase keys for corresponding runes, and some of the uppercase forms for the extra letters. The rule is each vowel's long variant (aa, ey, uu, ii, oo) is in the shift+vowel key, and the phonetically more distant variants (ei, ur, ir) are right under them (under E is D, thus, ei is shift+D). The exception is ah, which I deem frequent enough to place on its throne at the empty lowercase c key (long live the new high king).

This allots ease of memory, rather than typing convenience. For example, the german keyboard does away with ;'- and left bracket and adds öäüß. This is fast and convenient to type, but german people also have the right glyphs painted on their physical keyboards. I don't have that luxury, and this keyboard layout will be rarely exercised in the practitioner's mind, thus mnemonics win. The downside to eg. shift+D being ei, is that when typing dein 'guard', you have to type D, shift+D, N, but this might be the only example in the canon word list.

I decided against filling in the shift+letter forms with just letter, because that maps a single letter twice (likely leading to confused and divergent typing habits), may lead to mistyping, and would make it inconsistent with shift+M meaning M, but shift+K meaning ir. I also didn't mix latin and dragon in the layout, because 34 letters are a lot, and losing either lower or upper case of latin will cripple all normal typing. The futhark layouts on the babelstone website resemble these decisions, but they might have had different reasons.

Nonetheless, the layout feels good enough for me, and it forces me to think of compound letters as a single whole, not as transcriptions pronounced.

I only made a windows keyboard layout, because the Xorg kb layout configuration (and the console, and the...) on linux can burn in hell.

I don't expect people to pick this up, but in case someone has the same needs as I, and doesn't feel like duplicating work for no reason, then they are welcome to use this.

Links:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=22339
https://github.com/fontforge/fontforge/releases
https://babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/
https://www.kreativekorp.com/ucsur/
 


Zinrahzul
April 1, 2020

Meant to respond to this earlier! I'm definitely interested in trying this out!

I'll post my results when I get a chance.

by Zinrahzul
April 1, 2020

Meant to respond to this earlier! I'm definitely interested in trying this out!

I'll post my results when I get a chance.

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