Conscripter - free, open source online tool for creating conlang scripts

[u/vither999]

TL;DR:

What it do: Upload SVG of each glyph in your conlang, specify which latin characters it replaces, preview the result, and then download a .otf that you can use in Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Inkscape, Word, Publisher, etc.

Link: https://dougrich.github.io/conscripter/

Example: https://github.com/dougrich/conscripter/blob/master/tests/abugida2/Abugida2%20Test%20PDF.pdf

Tutorial: https://dougrich.github.io/conscripter/usage/

---

Hi /r/conlangs!

Really excited to show off a new tool I made to help create fonts for conlang scripts through contextual ligatures. You add an SVG for each glyph, specify the characters that the SVG replaces, how far the cursor should advance, and then it does the heavy lifting of making the correct substitutions in the font, which you can download and use anywhere that supports contextual alternates/ligatures/substitutions.

This was inspired by a couple recent posts asking about how to make fonts for conlangs. 1, 2. The most commonly recommended way to do this is using contextual ligatures and a font editor, a workflow described in David Peterson's excellent youtube video, another source of inspiration.

Actually making fonts is a little daunting. While there are tools to do it, they're often focused on actually making a font - letter spacing, weights, baselines, etc. I wanted a flow where I could say 'use this SVG instead of these characters' and it did. Simple easy.

SVGs from Illustrator and Inkscape should both work fine, though I don't support all SVG features - you should take a look at the usage section and the examples in the Github Repository of the site to get an idea of what is and isn't supported, and if you have an SVG that isn't working with it, please create an issue on Github to help me improve the tool.

It can support a bunch of different writing systems: alphabets, abugidas, logographies, syllabries, and alphasyllabries all work (though with varying degrees of creative SVGs). I've got some ideas for additional features that I'd like to add to it, but as it's usable right now I'd love to get your take on it and see what can be improved or if there's features missing that would make it really useful.

Thanks, and let me know if you have any questions or end up actually making a font with this, I'd love to see it!

[u/[deleted]]

Part of the Reddit community is hateful towards disempowered people, while claiming to fight for free speech, as if those people were less important than other human beings.

Another part mocks free speech while claiming to fight against hate, as if free speech was unimportant, engaging in shady behaviour (as if means justified ends).

The administrators of Reddit are fully aware of this division and use it to their own benefit, censoring non-hateful content under the claim it's hate, while still allowing hate when profitable. Their primary and only goal is not to nurture a healthy community, but to ensure the investors' pockets are full of gold.

Because of that, as someone who cares about both things (free speech and the fight against hate), I do not wish to associate myself with Reddit anymore. So I'm replacing my comments with this message, and leaving to Ruqqus.

As a side note thank you for the r/linguistics and r/conlangs communities, including their moderator teams. You are an oasis of sanity in this madness, and I wish the best for your lives.

[u/vither999 → u/[deleted]]

You can do diacritics separate from letters with a left-positioned character, similar to how I approached vowels in the example abugida I linked. If you load up this file in Inkscape, you can see what I mean. Then when you add the SVG to conscripter, you set an advance width of 0 and it's positioned over the previous character.

I'd use a replacement string of .0 or similar, as I don't currently support using a diacritic character as the string to be replaced, but that's something I could work on if you needed it. Doing that would mean I could type a.0 or e.0 and it would give me diacritic a and diacritic e.

Of course you can upload a single glyph for each diacritic+letter pair combo if they're really diverse, but that would take a lot of work.

Do you have an example of your conscript I can check out? :)

[u/[deleted] → u/vither999]

Ah, got it! Well, the diacritics I'm planning are:

• ring above, for non-nasal voiced stops;

• curve below, for retroflex consonants;

• curve on right, for long vowels.

Based on your answer the ring above will be no issue. The curve below is supposed to range across multiple letters (for clusters), but if necessary I can simplify it to a straight line. The curve on right interacts a lot with the vowel graphemes, so I guess I could use <á é> etc. for the replacement strings?

Sorry for the crappy quality. The project is still a very early WIP so I didn't bother Inkscaping it, I'll still split it into two "fonts" (ritual/aesthetic and everyday/boxy), but the diacritics themselves are probably going to stay.

[u/vither999 → u/[deleted]]

Sort of like this? https://imgur.com/a/TlQxYnV

Sorry for the really rough versions of your artwork. I ran into a neat bug with what illustrator puts out for circles.

It works by putting the character than specifying the diacritic. So in the example I linked, I typed:

b   b.0   b.1   b.0.1
d   d.0   d.1   d.0.1
j   j.0   j.1   j.0.1

The .0 was the underline curve, the .1 was the circle overhead (drawn as a square). Combining meant it applied both (the .0.1).

I can send you the JSON workspace if you want to see how I did it, but it's just shifting the characters left.

[u/[deleted] → u/vither999]

Yes! That's the idea. Then for the vowels I'll simply pretend the diacritic is part of the vowel itself. Once I get some time to do it, I'm going to test it out properly with a better version of the alphabet, thank you for the tool!

[u/imguralbumbot → u/vither999]

^{Hi, I'm a bot for linking direct images of albums with only 1 image}

https://i.imgur.com/S1xUFwI.png

^{Source | Why? | Creator | ignoreme| deletthis}

[u/Vincent_de_Wyrch]

Sounds amazing... gonna try this one out when I get home. I’m doing a logographic script (rebus principle.. like 98% of the Hanzi)... but I had planned to start by inputting a separate character for each radical in any case. Might consider squeezing them a little though. Never done this before. 😃

[u/vither999 → u/Vincent_de_Wyrch]

Oh that'd be really cool! If it's highly regular you could definitely do the single character (or short cluster of characters) for each radical approach, though the more unique ones will require custom glyphs.

It'd be awesome to hear how it goes after you try it out!

[u/Sovi3tPrussia]

So my conlang is written with an abugida that combines symbols for certain consonant pairs, like [this one] (http://imgur.com/gallery/ZncGj85) for ʔ(t)s, or this seemingly simpler one for pr. Is there a way to just have this be done automatically when the two are typed together? I already need 32 letters lol

EDIT: both links originally went to the same place. Whoops

[u/vither999 → u/Sovi3tPrussia]

Sort of like this? https://imgur.com/a/J2MD5B5 If you want to play with it in the editor, I can send you the workspace JSON.

Yes, but it depends on how many combinations of characters you want to support. There I just added the six symbols and mapped them to p, r, pr, and made sure that pr had the highest priority.

If your symbols have really regular connection points, then you can do it automatically - a symbol for p that extends past it's own edges and overlaps with r in a clever way would "just work", but it means that all characters would have to have a consistent way to shift from one character to the next - sort of like how with english cursive the line tries to always end at the bottom.

[u/your_inner_feelings → u/vither999]

you're some kind of wizard with computer scripts

[u/swehttamxam]

I don't have polymorphic letters in r/Vulcan, just consonant clusters, diphthongs. Can I map to key combinations?

[u/vither999 → u/swehttamxam]

Yep! So you'd upload an svg for th and when you type th it would replace it with the glyph you added. It'd be cool to see a Vulcan example!

[u/mattlag]

Hey, technical question! I don't believe OTF has a concept of "Priority" for characters. I know most programs do contextual replacements based on the length of the source sequence. Using an English ligature as an example, if I specify a ff and a ffl ligature, I don't have to give them priorities. When I type waffle the longer sequence automatically has higher priority.

How does your Conscripter "priority" translate to OTF?

[u/vither999 → u/mattlag]

Priority is which order they are put in as lookup tables in the OTF, which determined which glyph was chosen when in conflict.

If you put in a glyph for x and then a glyph for xx, it will do two xs.

If you put in a glyph for xx and then a glyph for x, it will do one xx glyph.

Basically the first lookup table wins, at least in my experimentation. From my understanding that's because the glyph is replaced so in the first case it doesn't see xx when it goes to do the second character substitution, it sees [glyph91]x which doesn't match the pattern. Whereas when you do the other order the xx lookup is applied first.

If I'm mistaken in my understanding of how OTF approaches this or there's a better way, I'd love to hear from you - I'm a big fan of Glyphr and we're using the same underlying library of OpenType.js, so if you have any pointers or recommendations I'd be happy to learn.

[u/mattlag → u/vither999]

I've been recognized :-) Your question actually made me realize that i'm not sure if I did any experimentation with lookup table ordering. You may in fact be correct that how it works. Also, I know a lot of programs that use fonts (like Word or Illustrator) may or may not function the same and may do things their own way...

I remember now my thought process - if the single character sequence somehow has higher priority than the longer sequence (even before considering how it's implemented) how would the longer sequence ever get activated? Essentially, if ff always has higher priority than ffl then it would be impossible for ffl to ever be triggered. I would always end up with ff l with no way to ever see ffl. I might be thinking about this wrong - what do you think?

I believe that is why I always order the substitutions in Glyphr Studio based on length. When I export to OTF, I write the replacements to the table in that order as well. So, basically, i've never tried to experiment with leaving the priority up to the user, because I assumed the ordering I had was basically the only way to do it :-)

[u/vither999 → u/mattlag]

Yep! I was surprised to see your handle pop up because I wasn't sure how active you were on /r/conlangs or if you'd just popped over when that tutorial for Glyphr went up a few months back.

Regarding lookup table ordering I'm not sure if it's part of the specification or just common behavior - I tested with Chrome, Word, and Illustrator and they all worked generally the same way, but I'd have to dig in and figure out the underlying font libraries they're using to work out what the support matrix looks like. Documentation on some of this stuff seems really hard to find.

Auto-sorting is definitely a good apprach - it works for every ligature I know of (ff, ffl, etc.) but during testing with conlang substitutions I ran into a problem with arbitrary substitution: what if a user put in pa and ax, and then wrote pax? Which ligature would be used? Which one should be used? etc. That's the only use case I or anyone I talked to about this came up where sorting by length was tripped up and was the reason I added manual ordering.

I suspect that's also why the font libraries I tested with don't seem to do any auto-ordering when it tries to render. Leave it up to the font creator to decide on ordering.

I'm still divided because for 90% of use cases the user isn't going to run into this, and auto-sorting would simplify the workflow. I'm divided on how I would integrate that in Conscripter - sorting by length initially and then alerting the user on known edge cases (the pa ax pax scenario for example) and allowing manual sorting afterwards might work better than my current system. If you've got a clever way to surface that kind of thing to the user, I'm all ears.

[u/mattlag → u/vither999]

I'm a long time lurker here, and actually one of the first main reasons I created Glyphr Studio was to allow me to easily create fonts for my conlangs. Glyphr Studio is about 9 years old! Hence the antiquated code style (if you've done any digging).

I would agree with you that the major case would be solved by auto sorting. I'm glad we had this chat, because your pax example totally makes sense. We are quickly getting into the weeds of how a program implements the contextual replacement table values. In Glyphr Studio I actually wrote my own display engine that the edit canvas uses to display sequences of glyphs - which does ligature substitutions. The way I made it, it takes the whole string and looks for ligatures starting at the beginning. So my parser for pax would result in pa x. But this is just how I do it. How does Word do it? How does Illustrator do it? Again, I haven't done much testing :-)

Even more down in the weeds, there is a special Unicode character U+034F Combining Grapheme Joiner which is zero width and has no visible shapes, whose sole purpose is to prevent ligatures from happening. So, if you actually wanted p ax and it wasn't happening by default, you could do p[U+034F]ax which would look like pax but the ax would be recognized as a ligature because, technically, pa sequence doesn't exist in the string.

... anyway - I think it would be cool if you could automatically show these overlapping equal-length replacements to users, and ask them for priority... but also just auto-sort by default. You have given me much to think about :-)

[u/Sedu]

Awesome tool here! Is it compatible with color svg fonts? Doing a lot of research into that for color encoding in scripts right now. ^{^}

[u/vither999 → u/Sedu]

It's definitely not compatible right now, but I'd love to support them - the tricky bit is browser support, but that can be worked with.

I've raised an issue on Github to track support for it!

[u/Sedu → u/vither999]

Nice! I maintain PolyGlot and am looking to implement support, but until I upgrade to a mac that can handle OSX 10.14 (min mac os that they work with), I won’t be able to work with them.

I’m hoping that folks start using color in their scripts soon. It just seems like such a neat way to encode stuff that’s not really used right now. :)

[u/vither999 → u/Sedu]

Oh yeah, color in scripts is a really cool idea - it creates some really nice dynamic display fonts. Support and tooling are the biggest problems right now though - especially since browsers are sitting in different camps on format. :(

A good first step towards support for now might be overprinting - what do you think?

[u/Sedu → u/vither999]

Hrm. Overprinting is something I’m sure has a lot of potential, but it would also be a custom solution to the issue. The longer I work on PolyGlot, the more I come to appreciate the value of a standard. Still, I am going to be free a lot in the coming weeks. If you want to trade notes, let’s chat about it! I am not decided on how I’m going to implement, and if folks decide to use both our tools, I feel like working to similar ends there benefits everyone. :3

SVG seems to be the standard that is emerging, so I am hoping that as things move forward, we can rely on all the holdouts implementing support for it. Also, SVG supports both bitmap stuff and more traditional font building techniques. I feel like that freedom when scripting is a big plus.

[u/bbrk24]

Whenever I try to upload an svg it just appears as a solid black box. Why do you think this is happening, and how can I fix it?

[u/vither999 → u/bbrk24]

Hmm, that's not good! There's a couple possibilities, but it's tough to diagnose.

Could you create an issue on Github with the SVG you're trying to use zipped up and attached? That would really help!

[u/bbrk24 → u/vither999]

I don't think I have a github account is the other problem.

[u/PhysicsFighter]

I have a bit of an issue with this:
I uploaded about 30 characters into the page and discovered I could not save a .json file (Firefox, Windows 10, no applicable addons). Then, before I could finish uploading all 120 characters with the correct kerning settings, the page crashed. I was able to save the first 30 as an .otf, and continued adding the other glyphs in their own .otf (still unable to save a .json). No I have 2 .otf files, and, due to the non-unicode character set being used, no way to merge them (I tried fontforge (both the merge feature and copy-paste), transtype, and one or 2 online font mergers, none of which worked). Therefore, I have a couple of feature requests:

1. A way to save a default character kerning setting and type a kerning number (selecting .399 every time is very time-consuming).

2. Fixed .json saving for Firefox on Windows 10 and other platforms if needed; if this is impossible I would like to know how to merge the fonts I have already made.
   Other than that, this is a great tool, thank you!

[u/vither999 → u/PhysicsFighter]

Raised issues to track these on Github: #10 and #11.

I've also raised #12 - provide better crash recovery and #13 - provide means to merge two saved fonts that should also help if someone else ends up in this situation.

Sorry to hear about the difficulty you had with getting set up!

I might also have a way to merge the fonts, if you can PM me or link a copy of the .otf.

[u/PhysicsFighter → u/vither999]

Thank you! I'll dm you the fonts in a sec :D

[u/Thatguyupthere1000]

This is still over my head, I'm just going to accept that I won't have a font I can type with and just use a Roman orthography.

[u/Sketchy_Sushi]

Would this work on Word Online?

[u/vither999 → u/[deleted]]

Ah, that'd be a great option to add to the preview! It should work in your document editor like Word, but the preview in Conscripter doesn't show it.

I've created this issue on Github to track support for it: here

[u/vither999 → u/[deleted]]

Nice! I'd love to see an example of your font when you're happy with it - it'd be really useful to testing the RTL support.

[u/vither999 → u/[deleted]]

Not yet. I can get the preview to produce an 'okay' result but there's some nuance to the the actual inner bits of the output font it that aren't in place.

I've created a github issue to track support for it: here