Consider supporting DIN 91379 (Unicode subset for Europe)

[thlinard]

Please consider supporting all letters and sequences of DIN 91379 "Characters and defined character sequences in Unicode for the electronic processing of names and data exchange in Europe".

Current rendering

Some letters and diacritics are missing or positioned incorrectly.
(Rendering using
InDesign v20.1
DINish VF v4.004 from this GitHub repo)

• latin_letters_1.3_DINish_4.04.pdf
• latin_list_1.3_DINish_4.04.pdf

Rendering with Arimo

(Rendering using
hb-view (HarfBuzz) 2.8.1
Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS — I took the liberty of linking the docs made for a similar request on the Ubuntu Sans repo)

• latin_letters_all_Arimo-Regular.pdf
• latin_list_all_Arimo-Regular.pdf

See also

• https://github.com/String-Latin/DIN-91379-Characters-and-Sequences List of characters and sequences of DIN 91379
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN_91379
• https://www.lucasfonts.com/learn/standard-compliant-fonts
• https://fontwerk.com/en/text/neue-din

[driehuis]

That sounds like a laudable goal. It also sounds like a ton of work. :-)

I'm afraid Vietnamese nor Greek will be in included in v4.005. I'll keep this issue open until they are. Thanks for collecting and collating all the helpful documentation, together with the info in #9 there is no excuse for them not landing eventually.

Remember I'm doing this in my spare time. At the moment, I'm fighting production issues, and most particularly the mushrooming effects of updates to build tools including fontbakery, fonttools and statmake (all needed because they expose genuine concerns, especially for the variable font when used on the desktop, but all causing ripple down effects). I've never in my life opened issues in so many different projects in such a short time. One annoying detail is that a fonttools update breaks the specimen builder, and that code being six years old in an ecosystem I'm not fluent with makes for slow progress.

If someone wishes to contribute glyphs, even just composed glyphs like Vietnamese, "we're taking patches". If you do, please coordinate with me first; I still try to put quality first and not break too much. On the other hand, I'm trying hard not to let the best be the enemy of the good (otherwise I would have sat on the variable font and the additional weights for years).

[thlinard]

No worries, I understand perfectly. I rather created this request as a long-term goal. But since you are implementing a German standard (1451), I thought of another one related to fonts, 91379.

Btw, the standard comes in two levels of support: the first is Latin-only; the second, extended, includes Greek and Cyrillic.

My job unfortunately imposes very strict rules on me for contributing to external projects, so I'm unfortunately in the position of only being able to request without offering anything, but I hope that the documentation indicated can be of use to you. My best wishes for your work.

[driehuis]

It absolutely is, thanks for your unabated support!