Characters in the YNLC Fonts
A Unicode font may contain tens of thousands of characters. The YNLC fonts are not complete Unicode fonts, in the sense that they contain all the characters defined in Unicode. They contain everything needed for writing or describing Yukon Languages and much more. They are derived from open source outlines available from the GNU software project. YNLCserif is based on FreeSerif which seems now to be distributed free with Linux. FreeSerif contains many more characters than are needed to represent Yukon languages, such as Greek and Cyrillic letters, the International Phonetic Alphabet and a variety of non-roman characters. In making YNLCserif, several characters were added and several were modified. None were eliminated, so it is possible that a specialized character for an African, Australian, or other language may be in the font.
Among many other characters, the YNLC fonts contain- All of the characters you would find in pre-Unicode roman fonts distributed with Macintosh or Windows, like Times or Arial. That is, everything you can access from a US keyboard as well as many other letters used for French, German and other languages.
- Additional base characters needed for Yukon work
, lower and upper case barred-l, schwa, epsilon, rho, chi, glottal stop, eng, oe, and OE. - Superscript diacritics
grave, acute, circumflex, tilde, macron, breve, dot above, dieresis, double grave, caron and hungarian umlaut (double acute). - Subscript diacritics
dot below, ring below, cedilla, ogonek and macron below. - Special modifier letters which look like an apostrophe or quotation marks
, but have separate coding.
Two or more diacritics may be stacked above or below any of the 26 English alphabet characters, or additional base characters listed above. This provides for great flexibility and probably makes it possible to use the font with a majority of the world's roman-based writing systems.
A technical document, Unicode Characters and Typing Yukon Languages (75K PDF), contains details on the characters and glyphs focussed on in the Yukon package. The chart indicates code page, hexadecimal codes, glyphs, Unicode names, PostScript names, keystrokes and current Yukon uses.
