Nasclitreacha
I saw Molly Noise linking to the first post from a new blog by J.D. Murphy which was about Gaelic fonts, much like the first proper post on this website. This was originally going to just go in my next what I’m reading roundup but I ended up being severely nerdsniped by it.
Like D.J. I use a font from Gaelchló on the Irish-language parts of my website, though preferring to be a little more pretentious and old-fashioned I use Mínchló rather than his choice of the more modern, sans-serif Úrchló. And much like D.J. I wanted to include the poncanna séimhithe instead of the affixed haitch that marks lenition in modern typography. Not considering the accessibility problems that he highlights in his post, I did this simply by using the little-used unicode codepoints for consonants with overdots1.
Seeing D.J.’s solution of modifying the typeface to include custom ligatures instead I immediately wanted to copy it and so set about making a modified version of Mínchló for this site. Despite my talk of being old-fashioned I decided, for readability purposes, not to use the stylistic set for Insular-style s and r, but did I customise the r glyph such that it is mostly the Roman-style but with the trailing foot of the Insular style, much like I do in my own handwriting. Font Forge did give a few warnings when exporting the modified fonts but they seem to be displaying well for me.
The customised font and updated text should be visible in the title of this post2 as well as any other Irish writing on the site3 and I have went back replaced overdot character codepoints with modern spelling.
