Request for Community Contributions to Inter Font Project

Feature & Design Feedback
1

As you know, we changed our main Blender font to Inter, a popular open-source font designed specifically for user interfaces. Unfortunately it is missing three characters needed for one of our translations.

Although our Abkhazian language translation is in its very early stages I would like for them to have a complete alphabet. Inter has very good coverage of the main Cyrillic Unicode block, but it is missing much of the “Cyrillic Supplement” block that contains some characters needed for some languages such as Abkhaz, Kurdish, Komi, Mordvin, Aleut, Azerbaijani, and Chuvash.

One solution - that I would like to avoid - is for us to add another font to our stack to fill in this coverage hole. Instead I would love for some members of our large community to contribute characters to Inter’s project.

For the Abkhazian language we just need three characters. Each of them is a variation on characters already in the set, so you can just copy an existing character and make small changes to it.

  • U+049E : Ҟ - Capital letter KA with stroke (copy from U+049C or U+049A and make changes)
  • U+0524 : Ԥ - Capital letter PE with descender (copy from U+041F and add descender)
  • U+0525 : ԥ - Small letter PE with descender (copy from U+043F and add descender)

Keep in mind the bigger picture here. Inter is one of the world’s most-used typefaces. By helping them out by adding three characters you are allowing an entire language to use it. A language used by 200,000 people and one that is classified as Vulnerable by UNESCO.

If this interests you, consider that you can add support for the entire Kurdish language by simply copying characters within the font:

  • U+051A : Ԛ - Capital letter QA (literally just copy uppercase “Q”)
  • U+051B : ԛ - Small letter QA (literally just copy lowercase “q”)
  • U+051C : Ԝ - Capital letter WE (literally just copy uppercase “W”)
  • U+051D : ԝ - Small letter WE (literally just copy lowercase “w”)

Azerbaijani can be supported by adding two characters:

  • U+0526 : Ԧ - Capital letter SHHA with descender (copy from U+04BA and add descender)
  • U+0527 : ԧ - Small letter SHHA with descender (copy from U+04BB and add descender)

Inter is an open-source (SIL Open Font License 1.1) project on github that welcomes contributions. Their main github page contains links to instructions on how to compile and build the font files and how to contribute. GitHub - rsms/inter: The Inter font family

Thank you for helping to make the world a better place.

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2

I am surprised that I couldn’t find any existing issues discussing these characters on the repo.

@Harleya Do you think it would be beneficial to create an issue with this information on the inter repo?

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I’m honestly not sure how that project would prefer to deal with this kind of thing.

I don’t consider this a bug or defect of the font, but just a lack of features. The designer has almost single-handedly covered 147 different language scripts and no single font can support all languages. But there is already such good support of the main Cyrillic Unicode block that it makes sense that Cyrillic-using community members could help fill out the Supplement block to support the minority languages.

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