U+10ACF MANICHAEAN LETTER YODH has two shapes: curl and dot

[dscorbett]

Font

NotoSansManichaean-Regular.otf

Where the font came from, and when

Site: https://github.com/notofonts/manichaean/releases/tag/NotoSansManichaean-v2.005
Date: 2023-10-07

Font version

Version 2.005

Issue

This font uses two shapes of U+10ACF MANICHAEAN LETTER YODH: a curl by default and a dot in ligatures. It should be consistent. I tentatively recommend using the dot shape because it seems much more common in body text.

M 98 and M 102, for example, use the curl shape in the heading and mostly the dot shape in the body. M 102 has three instances of the ⟨𐫝𐫏⟩ ligature: the yodh is a curl on line 1 of the body and a dot on lines 6 and 9. That shows that the choice of shape is not determined by whether there is a ligature.

The current dot in the ligature glyph is too small. It should be the height of a letter.

Character data

𐫏𐫝𐫏
U+10ACF MANICHAEAN LETTER YODH
U+10ADD MANICHAEAN LETTER SADHE
U+10ACF MANICHAEAN LETTER YODH

Screenshot

[simoncozens]

Fixed in #9!

[dscorbett]

This is not fixed. This bug report is about the inconsistency of standalone yodh with ligated yodh. The new glyphs are still inconsistent with each other. The reason they should be consistent with each other is that this ligature is supposed to be just a minor (and optional; see #2) modification of two adjacent shapes to fit better together (like Latin “fi”) rather than a new shape (like Arabic “لا”).

The new glyph for yodh is a curl with a ball terminal. However, in Manichaean, yodh has two variants (dot and curl) but I have not seen this combined variant of dotted curl. To be clear, the dot is not supposed to be a terminal: it is the entire letter. I’m calling it a dot but it isn’t necessarily always literally round. It is about the size of other small letters, like U+10AC7 MANICHAEAN LETTER WAW, not as small as U+10AF4 MANICHAEAN PUNCTUATION DOT.

[simoncozens]

@PaulHanslow FYI

[PaulHanslow]

Cheers. Will update shortly or early next week.
...and I appreciate the feedback, David @dscorbett.

[PaulHanslow]

@dscorbett, I'll do my best to correct the issue. Sometimes pictures (even if they're rough) go a long way in helping to understand the issue. Text base descriptions have their place yet how the mind's eye visually interprets descriptions can vary vastly.

[dscorbett]

There are links to scans of manuscripts in the first comments of this issue and #2.