Some Private Use Area code points for ligatures for a science fiction story.

I have for many years been interested in both the history of early printed books, particularly those from the fifteenth century, which is known in relation to printing as the incunabula period, and also in the Esperanto language.

The Esperanto language is an artificially constructed language, first published in 1887, so there are clearly no books from the incunabula period printed in Esperanto.

Yet this is a pity, for the idea of a book which could be read around the world in a neutral language, available to all on equal terms, printed so as to look like the black letter books of the fifteenth century with wood block style illustrations, is quite appealing.

Out of this came my idea for a medieval printer of Esperanto, which is, of course, an impossibility, yet one of those concepts about which, within the context of a science fiction story, readers might choose to suspend their disbelief for a while.

This printer would be wishing to print a copy of Aesop's fable in Esperanto, writing to William Caxton to ask if he could possibly arrange to borrow his woodcut blocks.

Yet something rather interesting would happen. For, in the best practice of story telling, a problem would arise. The problem is that he finds that he needs long s circumflex sorts and also some long s circumflex ligatures.

So, he sets about trying to obtain the necessary characters and the problem gets worse as he finds that these characters are needed in no other language.

What is to happen?

As he is in a strange time warp situation anyway, can he get a fount from the future, a computerized fount and, as he takes it through the time warp, have it turn into a metal fount, to suit the technology of the age in which he lives?

Yes, it is all very science fiction, even science fantasy, yet there is the possibility that, bearing in mind that translations of various fables from various authors already exist in Esperanto, that reproductions of woodcuts are very often language independent and that there are today various publish on demand facilities available on the web, it is not beyond the realms of practical possibility that, given the correct fount, a very nicely designed, not too expensive, publish on demand book of fables in Esperanto, set in a black letter face in the style of an incunabula book, could be available to order in bookshops around the world, and in internet bookshops too.

Hence this document. One matter that is important is that the language of the text will be exactly the same as modern Esperanto, there is no attempt to be made to produce some artificial old language. The idea is that people could read the Esperanto text easily using modern dictionaries. The only difference from the normal look of Esperanto printing is the use of the black letter type face and the use of the long s characters. Not all of the long s characters used would be accented, for Esperanto uses an ordinary letter s as well as an s circumflex.

Part of the interest in this science fiction story is intended to be the including of enough detail so that readers may themselves, if they so wish, explore the idea of the production of such an Esperanto incunabula style book, perhaps producing a sample page using a desktop publishing package if a suitable fount is by that time available. So, the science fiction story is an entry point to an interactive art experience.

So, which characters are needed? The first design point is to think that it may be only once that a type designer finds this document on the internet and decides that he or she would like to implement the characters in the list that is included in this document. So the list needs to be complete. If there is a doubt as to which characters to include, then it is better to include a character and it be never used than not to include it and it one day be needed. Yet, although the effort needed to add a new ligature, given the constituent letters, may be far less expensive and time consuming than if metal type were being made, it is undesirable to include ligatures which are almost certainly never going to be needed.

The next point to consider is that although it is possible that the designer of such a fount will be interested in, and knowledgeable of, the Esperanto language, that may not necessarily be the case.

So this document also contains a listing of the twelve accented characters which are necessary for printing Esperanto, together with their Unicode code points, and also, the long s and the Eszett character.

The Eszett character is not needed for Esperanto, but it would be nice to have it in the fount for completeness.

In relation to the U+015D s circumflex character, it may well be the case that if a long s circumflex is used in a particular document that no ordinary s circumflex character will be used in that same document. This is unlike an ordinary s still being used in a document which contains long s characters, as in an Esperanto text, although a word may end in s it is, as far as I am aware, not possible for a word to end in s circumflex, except in the circumstances where a word ends in o and is used in poetry, when the final o may be dropped if desired.

However, anyone considering adding the characters for Esperanto into a black letter fount and also adding in these science fiction fantasy ligatures is asked to ensure please that the U+015D s circumflex character is included so that the black letter fount may be used to print in Esperanto using the black letter fount without using the long s characters at all.

In addition the seven regular Unicode ligatures from U+FB00 through to U+FB06 are desirable in the fount as well.

In addition many of the ligature characters of the golden ligatures collection could be included, some of which could be used in the Esperanto text and some of which could not be so used, due to the structure of the language, where double letters do not occur, except at the joining point of compound words, though Esperanto is able to be used to produce compound words as the need arises.

I recognize that if a type designer is adding such accented characters to a black letter fount that he or she might also be including accents for other languages at the same time, though perhaps they would have been implemented previously. This too would be welcome.

The five experimental ligatures are listed at the end of the list, as they might be the last to be made, if indeed they are ever made. However, if a type designer has become interested in the story and made the other 29 characters in this science fiction fantasy set, then perhaps he or she might quite like to make these additional 5, just so as to complete the sorts needed for the story and perhaps to include in a synopsis of the fount which he or she has produced.

Where would such characters be located in the Private Use Area of Unicode?

Well, a good choice might be from U+E7E0 and upwards, with the five experimental ligatures in the U+E7C. section.

This would place the accents not too far away from the golden ligatures collection, yet clearly distinct from, and not a part of, the golden ligatures collection. However, a fount designer who chose to include these science fiction ligatures could easily include them in a fount in a convenient manner when implementing the golden ligatures code points.

Yes, it is science fiction and the fount for these characters may never get produced, yet the existence of this document perhaps makes it possible that one day such a fount may be available and that people may enjoy owning and reading such a book.

Certainly, this is quite a number of accented characters, yet, if a fount designer is sufficiently interested to make any of these accented characters at all and include them in a fount, then perhaps he or she will enjoy the making of this quite comprehensive set of characters and enjoying the science fiction fun of imagining them passing through a time warp and becoming made as metal type.

However, there are quite a lot of special long s circumflex ligatures selected, so, if a type designer is perhaps wishing to add just a few rather than all of them, perhaps long s circumflex, long s circumflex t, long s circumflex i and long s circumflex l would be the four that it might be best to produce first, so that if only the long s circumflex character itself and a few long s circumflex ligatures are produced, then those four characters would be my suggestion for those which might be most useful in practice.

In contrast, use of a long s circumflex b ligature would be quite rare. Use of long s circumflex h circumflex ligature would be so rare as to be almost non-existent without some effort to find such a word, though a compound word could be produced from a root word ending in s circumflex and a root word starting with h circumflex. Perhaps such a double accented ligature might provide an interesting challenge to a type designer which he or she might like to try.

I realize that the number of characters needed would be a huge amount of work for only one science fiction project if, from a standing start, someone were to produce a black letter font just containing the characters necessary to produce the books imagined in the science fiction story. However, if someone were producing a black letter font for use on a computer and were including some long s ligatures and some other ligatures and accented characters anyway, perhaps the additional effort needed to add the twelve regular Unicode accented characters for Esperanto and some of the special characters needed for such books as are imagined in this document might not be too much of an unreasonable load upon the font designer's time. Whether one or more font designers produce a font with the long s circumflex character and some or all of the ligature characters in this collection of science fiction ligatures is something that cannot be predicted. It may happen or it may not. However, by publishing this document on the web, the chance of it happening exists.

Readers interested in the nature of the Private Use Area in the Unicode system may like to look in chapter 13, section 13.5 of the Unicode specification, which document is available in pdf format from the http://www.unicode.org website.

Unicode at present has some ligature characters and also a long s on its own and the German Eszett character.

The long s on its own is encoded in Unicode as U+017F and the Eszett as U+00DF.

Unicode currently has the ligatures ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, long s t and st at U+FB00 through to U+FB06.

There is presently a policy of not adding any further ligature characters to regular Unicode.

Please note that in relation to the names of those characters in the list below which are regular Unicode characters, the names in the list below are not the full Unicode formal names for the characters.

Regular Unicode characters for Esperanto.

U+0108 C circumflex
U+0109 c circumflex
U+011C G circumflex
U+011D g circumflex
U+0124 H circumflex
U+0125 h circumflex
U+0134 J circumflex
U+0135 j circumflex
U+015C S circumflex
U+015D s circumflex
U+016C U breve
U+016D u breve

Regular Unicode long s and Eszett

U+017F long s
U+00DF Eszett

Science fiction ligatures

U+E7E0 long s circumflex
U+E7E1 long s circumflex i
U+E7E2 long s circumflex l
U+E7E3 long s circumflex t
U+E7E4 long s circumflex b
U+E7E5 long s circumflex f
U+E7E6 long s circumflex h
U+E7E7 long s circumflex h circumflex
U+E7E8 long s circumflex k
U+E7E9 long s circumflex long s
U+E7EA long s circumflex long s circumflex
U+E7EB f h circumflex
U+E7EC f long s circumflex
U+E7ED long s h circumflex
U+E7EE long s long s circumflex
U+E7EF unused at present

U+E7F0 long s circumflex long s i
U+E7F1 long s circumflex long s l
U+E7F2 long s circumflex long s t
U+E7F3 long s circumflex long s circumflex i
U+E7F4 long s circumflex long s circumflex l
U+E7F5 long s circumflex long s circumflex t
U+E7F6 long s long s circumflex i
U+E7F7 long s long s circumflex l
U+E7F8 long s long s circumflex t
U+E7F9 f long s circumflex i
U+E7FA f long s circumflex l
U+E7FB f long s circumflex t
U+E7FC long s circumflex fi
U+E7FD long s circumflex fl
U+E7FE unused at present
U+E7FF unused at present

U+E7CB f long s h circumflex
U+E7CC f long s long s circumflex
U+E7CD f long s long s circumflex i
U+E7CE f long s long s circumflex l
U+E7CF f long s long s circumflex t

William Overington

20 July 2002