font.is

The Mak­ing of Thorn, thorn, Eth, eth

When a designer in Ice­land is pick­ing a font to use for his design some of the desired fonts are impos­si­ble to use for the Ice­landic lan­guage. How come?

In addi­tion to the Eng­lish alpha­bet the Ice­landic lan­guage requires few spe­cial char­ac­ters. These accented and spe­cial char­ac­ters are:
á é í ó ú ý ð þ æ ö
Á É Í Ó Ú Ý Ð Þ Æ Ö

See this more detailed at Dia­crit­ics site.

Accented char­ac­ters are com­mon in scan­di­na­vian and east­ern Euro­pean lan­guages and are there­fore more likely to be included in the fonts. How ever we often real­ize that the Thorn, thorn, Eth and eth are missing.

Most foundries and seri­ous font design­ers stick to the Adobe Stan­dard Encod­ing or even wider encod­ing for Open Type and include those char­ac­ters in their fonts. How­ever there are many cases where the char­ac­ters are not drawn right or even that the font designer may have cho­sen to make the char­ac­ters in a style that is unac­cept­able for use. This is most evi­dent in the design­ing of the eth. The rea­son is most likely that the font design­ers lack the knowl­edge about the basic form of the char­ac­ter. Some com­mon and bad ver­sions include where a d with a stroke is used as an eth, and where the ascen­der gets a curly end.

Gunnlau­gur S. E. Briem, an Ice­landic font designer has on his web­site some very good descrip­tions on how to get the Thorns and the Eths right. Font design­ers are encour­aged to take a look at his site to get the idea.

The shape of the eth is of course up to the font designer to make. The over­all feel of the type­face must be con­sid­ered. With some basic infor­ma­tion like the ones Gunnlau­gur pro­vides the eth would surely fit nicely with the other characters.

Let’s look briefly at these characters.

Þ Thorn
Mak­ing a Thorn in a font edi­tor like Font­Lab or a vec­tor pro­gram is eas­i­est by using the P. A handy way is to put together an I and a P, lower the P and then cut off the descen­der. Be care­ful because I and P don’t always have the same ascen­der thick­ness like in this example.

þ thorn
The most com­mon way to make a thorn is to add the ascen­der of a b to a p. In Font­Lab Stu­dio, when you dou­ble click on the thorn glyph win­dow to make a new glyph, Font­Lab puts a b and the ver­ti­cal Bar in the thorn slot and the width of the bar. It’s not a very good start­ing point and I expect Font­Lab to change that in next update and use the p and b.
In join­ing b and p, take into con­sid­er­a­tion how the bowl con­nects to the ascen­der. You prob­a­bly would fol­low the way the p does.

Ð Eth
Based on a D with an added stroke. Most often the stroke should be like the bar of H but many like to see it a bit nar­rower like in this exam­ple. The stroke should be longer on the right side of the stem but with­out fill­ing the neg­a­tive space too much.
The width of Eth can almost every time be the same as the D but of course the over­all feel­ing of the font decides.
Many years ago I com­pared the afm (Adobe Font Met­rics) tables of the Adobe Font Folio for the Ice­landic char­ac­ters. At the time the col­lec­tion had about 1600 fonts. I only found five exam­ples where the with of the Eth dif­fered from the D.

ð eth
This glyph is the hard­est one and most mis­un­der­stood. But first: Never use a d as a base for an eth.
Most com­mon is to base eth on an o and use the same width for it. Some pre­fer to lower the o–sec­tion slightly. Com­mon prac­tise at Emi­gre as an exam­ple. As Gunnlau­gur points out, other forms in a font may be found in the right paren­the­sis. Per­son­ally I find it only in very rare cases use­ful to com­bine it to an o. Nei­ther do I find the num­ber 9 to do the trick. It can be quite time con­sum­ing to tilt and bend to fit it for a nice eth. For an expe­ri­enced user of bezier curves or a font designer it is as quick or even faster sim­ply to man­u­ally draw the ascen­der in a vec­tor application.

The eth takes con­sid­er­able ink and where the stem and the o–sec­tion meet is often the thick­est part of any char­ac­ter in a font. Depend­ing of the design of the font you may want to use vari­a­tions like this to make the eth. The first one is the one I used before. Sec­ond one shows a dif­fer­ent approach and the third one is adapt­ing to forms found in the font.

I hope this will throw some light on the forms of these char­ac­ters and help mak­ing it more suit­able for Icelandic.

To add to this I just want to men­tion that when mak­ing an Open­Type font with a lot of lig­a­tures one might want to add a few extra lig­a­tures for Ice­landic. We have com­mon char­ac­ter com­bi­na­tions like fð, fþ and ði and some more, that sim­ply cry out for a lig­a­ture no one has ever made before.