When working in the non-english-speaking world, it’s a common scenario that a typeface used for a design is missing a small number of diacritics or glyphs used in a specific language – german, icelandic, norse, polish…
A language that uses the latin alphabet “plus some special characters” is the Pan-Nigerian alphabet. By adding those characters to a font that was missing them, the font becomes usable for millions of people. Nigeria has a population of approximately 216.7 million, speaking over over 525 native languages.
In this exercise, students receive the task to make an open-source font available for the Nigerian native languages, by adding the missing characters.
The list of glyphs needed:
- Ɓ / ɓ = (U+0181 and U+0253) (aka uni0181, uni0253)
- Ɗ / ɗ = (U+018A and U+0257)
- Ǝ / ǝ = (U+018E and U+01DD)
- Ẹ / ẹ = (U+1EB8 and U+1EB9)
- Ị / ị
- Ƙ / ƙ = (U+0198 and U+0199)
- Ọ / ọ
- Ṣ / ṣ = (U+1E62 and U+1E63)
- Ụ / ụ