Template talk:Insular

Function & Application

Can anyone explain how this template works, and how it can be applied to other fonts? ----Gavin Collins (talk|contribs) 09:47, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

The template is selecting and printing SVG images from Commons (from Commons:Category:Insular script). It has multiple subpages and calls to other templates, but I think all you would really need to change is the Template:Insular/file subpage (or equivalent in your new template). If you had another set of character images, a quick and dirty way to adapt the template would be to just change the filename in the subpage (the calls to the subpages, and maybe the list of characters, would need updating too). - AdamBMorgan (talk) 17:39, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

Still needed

To be useful for Irish, this still needs capital letters as well as ṡ. To be useful for Old English, it needs ý, æ, and ǽ. For Irish it would be nice to also have ɼ, ſ, and ẛ. I don't know of any particular need for ṙ, but since it's already here, there's no reason to get rid of it either. Angr 11:07, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Oh yeah, it needs punctuation too! And the punctuation should include the Tironian et, ⁊. Angr 11:18, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

I can see that I missed some things, not being really familiar with Gaelic Irish. I just grabbed the letters from File:Evolution of minuscule.svg (and added diacritics where necessary). If someone could point me toward a good open source font or image(s) of all necessary glyphs for Gaelic and/or Old English, I could start setting this template up to be more faithful to actual usage. --Eliyak T·C 00:22, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't know of any. Irish and Old English would really require separate letter shapes in many cases anyway. File:Beowulf.firstpage.jpeg and File:Peterborough.Chronicle.firstpagetrimmed.jpg show how the insular script was used for Old English (looking at that reminds me that Old English needs þ and ð as well); [1] (and the rest of that file) shows how the Gaelic script was used for Irish. They're similar but not identical--note especially the different shapes of "a", though perhaps they could be unified by using either ᴀ (U+1D00) for the Irish "a" or ɑ (U+0251) for the Old English "a". Angr 00:50, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

I have located a freely licensed — but not Commons-compliant — font. It's quite beautiful and seems to match perfectly. I have sent the creator a request to let us use svg images of the letters. Let's keep our fingers crossed. --Eliyak T·C 04:09, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

The shapes of individual letters aren't copyrightable anyway, are they? Angr 14:38, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Apparently fonts are copyrightable. Anyway they usually have licenses attached. I'd rather not risk the images being deleted. --Eliyak T·C 15:28, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Good news - permission granted. I will start converting the letters to svg. --Eliyak T·C 20:46, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Things are coming together at {{Gaelic}}. Not fully functional yet, but getting there. --Eliyak T·C 00:49, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Replacement with web fonts

We are able to use insular glyphs using web fonts now. Is there any reason not to do so? —Beleg Tâl (talk) 13:37, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Actually, since neither this nor {{gaelic}} is commonly used, I will be bold and change it. —unsigned comment by Beleg Tâl (talk) .

Webfont limitation removed in Junicode 0.900

See the following discussions:

• Junicode feature request https://sourceforge.net/p/junicode/feature-requests/51/
• Phabricator https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T173573

—Beleg Tâl (talk) 14:04, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

@Beleg Tâl: Reading that answer from 2017, I think what the Junicode author in that feature request meant is that doing ᵹ̇ (ᵹ Latin small letter insular g U+1D79 + combining dot above U+0307) works – and well, it does. But it uses completely different Unicode code-points than what we do in most Irish texts, ie. using either ġ (the Latin small letter g with dot above U+0121 codepoint) or ġ (ASCII g U+0067 + combining dot above U+0307) – and those do not work even with the SS02 feature enabled. Silmethule (talk) 18:13, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

@Silmethule: hmm, I think you're right. I suppose that means that we may need to put up with improperly formed ġ :( —Beleg Tâl (talk) 01:28, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

In the new version of Junicode (under development), if you turn on ss02 and set the language to either Irish or Old Irish, you'll get much of the wishlist on this page, including the dotted insular g (as a variant of either U+0121 or g + U+0307). Not everything, I'm afraid: Junicode is still Junicode, with a tall ascender height, etc. I have dropped a test document into the docs folder of the repository, and would welcome comments. (The font itself won't be up for a few days.) Psb1558 (talk) 03:45, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

@Psb1558: looks good! Where would the best place to comment? --Yodin^T 15:47, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, @Yodin. If you can open a GitHub issue, that would be best from my point of view (because I like having the record), but if that's not convenient here is fine too. Psb1558 (talk) 16:34, 2 April 2022 (UTC)

I missed these comments earlier. @Beleg Tâl: seems this will solve the problem. There is currently still an issue with the placement of the dot in ḃ for Irish, but it’ll be fixed soon – so when Junicode 2 ver. 1.058 comes out, it might be a good time for another Phabricator ticket (if switching to Junicode 2 Beta is acceptable). Silmethule (talk) 22:32, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

@Beleg Tâl: And letting you know that @Psb1558: has released 1.058 (available in the git repo under fonts/) with the ḃ shape adjusted – so should be good for Irish typesetting now. Would be cool if we could get the font updated now. It also supports some post Unicode 14 characters like “Old Polish o”, o rogate ⟨Ꟁ, ꟁ⟩ missing from the old font (Polish wikisource uses various workarounds for this glyph though, not using Junicode or the Unicode codepoint currently). Silmethule (talk) 11:52, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

I started a Phabricator issue (I hope I did that correctly and in the correct place!). https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T338030 Silmethule (talk) 13:26, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

@Beleg Tâl, @Yodin, @Psb1558: Seems we do have Junicode 2.100 now and the limitations no longer apply! (for some reason it renders with wrong font on Firefox on my Android phone though, but that seems to be unrelated, not idea why it doesn’t pick the web font up). Silmethule (talk) 14:00, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

There’s a problem with st (but eg. sm or even ṡt is OK) – we get a ligature with the long s… probably worth reporting a bug in the font and in the meantime we should disable this ligature in font features. Silmethule (talk) 14:09, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

That's great news; thanks for working on this @Silmethule and @ShakespeareFan00! --Yodin^T 09:54, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Bad news is I can’t find a way to get rid of the tall s. I’ve filed a bug report and this’ll be fixed for Irish in the next release. But that means we need another update done to ULS… So we’ll probably have to live with it for some time :( (unless there’s a way I missed). Silmethule (talk) 13:52, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Junicode limitations

Great that we're using a webfont for this now, much better than it was! Junicode seems alright, but as well as the problems with lenited letters mentioned on the doc page, there are still quite a few issues:

• a is using the latin form, rather than the delta-shaped Gaelic a
• b is also pretty much standard latin, rather than having a short ascender
• d is better, but not very typical of Gaelic fonts, ideally should be shorter and turned up rather than 45° diagonal
• e doesn't have the horizontal bar extending beyond the round part of the letter
• g can be closed like this, but generally an open, more S like letter is used
• h tends not to have the extender going up as high as this
• l often has a curve at the bottom in Gaelic typefaces

While it doesn't have to be perfect, the closer we have to the majority of the books that we're transcribing the better! With that in mind, there are also some books that use more of a "pseudo-gaelic font", like Page:Writings of Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland.djvu/156 – maybe if we ever get the freely licensed fonts to do so, we could have two different fonts and templates (one for the standard Gaelic typefaces, and another for these more Carolingian-inspired ones)? --Yodin^T 10:09, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

If you can find examples to use as a guide, the developer of the font will respond relatively quickly. That's how ceertain support for Paleographic forms got looked at for Record-type (amongst other things). ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 20:33, 2 June 2023 (UTC)

Not working?

@CalendulaAsteraceae: the output of this template now seems to displaying as a standard latin font (CSS font-family: serif), not in insular script. Is anyone else having the same issue? --Yodin^T 07:18, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

@Yodin: Sorry about that, I updated {{ULS}} and didn't do enough testing for CSS precedence issues. Should be fixed now. —CalendulaAsteraceae (talk • contribs) 18:53, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

No worries, thanks for the fix; looks good! --Yodin^T 18:55, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

It still wasn't working but I fixed it - it was pointing to the templatestyles sheet for {{ULS}} instead of its own templatestyles sheet :D —Beleg Tâl (talk) 15:30, 18 January 2024 (UTC)