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• • June 21, 2018 at 5:05 pm #104473
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Hello,

    I have a problem working on a bilingual bible in french and ewe, which is an african language. I found an ewe font called Capecoast and it’s working ok, despite the fact it exists only in regular, not in bold and italic. It was quite a hassle just finding that, since the Google Noto multiligual font supposedly working for ewe actually doesnt work.

    But my problem is that certain letters come out as red squares, as shown here : https://bibleostervald.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Red-square-ewe-letter.jpg

    What’s weird is that if I copy and paste a red square into a search/find box this letters will show properly.

    I’m really not sure what to do, do you have an idea what could fix that ?
    Help is greatly appreciated.

  • June 22, 2018 at 2:12 am #104476
    Niels JÌürgen Pedersen

    Participant

    It is because this character dosnt exist in the font. Missing characters is usually marked as a red box.

    In “Glyphs” under “Type” you can se characters included in the font.

  • June 22, 2018 at 2:59 am #104478
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    I found a “Capecoast” Ewe font … but it’s horrible!

    Checking with Glyphs, I found that the capitals and lowercase characters are in normal positions, but the “special” characters are mapped to the exclamation point, dollar, asterisk and so on. If that is indeed the font that you are using, ditch it. It is not Unicode compatible and will, at some point, cause problems.

    You are presumably encountering problems with Noto because this encoding is all wrong. If the encoding was right, it should definitely work. You could even use Times New Roman (a relatively modern version such as provided with Windows 10), as this has all the required characters on all the right places.

    If this is the font that you are using and some of the characters appear right, that’s only because the author used the same font. Bite the bullet NOW, then, and replace each of the “wrong” characters in this font with the “real” character. Yes, that is a relatively serious amount of work, but you’ll only have to do this once.

  • June 22, 2018 at 8:26 am #104481
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Thank you both for your replies !

    Theunis I’m willing to work on this and make it right. I can’t stay with squares in my text anyway, and I agree this Capecoast isn’t great bu I thought I didn’t have any choice.

    How can I make the encoding right ? If you have a link or document explaining the process that would greatly help me as I don’t know what encoding is. I suppose I’ll need an ewe keyboard which I already have, and then…?

    Using Times New Roman would be good if I could, that’s what I’m using for my text in french. We kept it simple.

  • June 22, 2018 at 12:30 pm #104482
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    It basically comes down to a series of search-and-replaces.

    1. Look up the proper Unicode values for each Ewe character in turn. There is bound to be a relevant website somewhere, but if you can’t find any, use the Glyphs panel with Times New Roman selected to find them. If you have a modern CC version of InDesign, then you can enter part of the official “character name” in the search box in Glyphs. The official names are those of the Unicode consortium so they tend to be rather stuffy, but you’ll soon get the hang of how they are described.
    2. Insert this character anywhere in a document, as you need a “correct” one to copy from.
    3. Paste this into the Change To field of the Find/Change dialog.
    4. Copy the Ewe character from your current text and paste it into the Find What part of the Find/Change dialog.
    5. Set the Find What formatting to your current (presumably “bad”) Ewe font.
    6. Set the Change To formatting to Times New Roman.
    7. Replace All.
    8. Repeat for the next character. After a while you’ll have a hard time locating the next character to change, so use Find Font to locate it. If it does not report the original Ewe font anymore, you are done!

  • June 23, 2018 at 1:45 pm #104491
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Thank you so much Theunis. So I did as you said and it took me about 2h to encode everything. I found an ewe alphabet online which helped me copy and paste most of the “correct” ewe characters in unicode. Some others were not there, I think they were characters from another african dialect, but eventually I found their unicode on wikipedia.

    No more white or red boxes, and now I can put ewe text in italic or bold using Times New Roman.
    Thanks again, greatly appreciate your help. I couldn’t have figured this out on my own.

  • July 30, 2018 at 1:05 pm #105126
    Johanna Charpentier

    Member

    Following up on my question, encoding the characters worked.

    Although it didn’t work perfectly, it caused many errors in the text. The best would be for the Bible translation team in ewe and myself to have the same font. Because they send me text in a Word document or PDF, an everytime they make a change to their text I have to start over the encoding process, which creates again new errors.

    So my question is: can I add unicode characters into the Times New Roman font ? Or create a font for ewe that would be unicode compatible? Please advise on what would be best, I have zero experience in doing this sort of things with fonts.

    Thanks

  • July 31, 2018 at 10:56 am #105141
    Lindsey Martin

    Member

    Joanna, Theunis has given you good, practical advice for dealing with your publication. But, have you had a look at the resources available at SIL (https://www.sil.org)? Your project is the kind on which they focus and they have a lot of resources available, including free fonts that are generally of very high quality. A search of their website for ‘Ewe’ returns 16 hits. Check out https://software.sil.org/products, where you can see some of their tools and contact the Language Technology team.

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