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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1420529
Anchors Aweigh - Easy Diacritics Words by FontLab Did you ever wonder what these things were: ^ ° ¨ ̴¯ ´ ¸ ˇ ˋ ˘ ˜̑͒ ? “Diacritics” are not often seen in English, but they’re common and essential in many other languages that use the Latin script. Why? Because most other languages aren’t a perfect fit with the Latin alphabet. Many have sounds that most Romans never heard (like ë in German). And sometimes we need a hint to know which syllable carries the stress. Americans pronounce “Panama” with the accent on the first syllable, but Panameños say “Panamá”, stressing the last syllable. And since this is different from the way most Spanish words are stressed they require an accent to remind us. You may, therefore, find yourself in a situation where you need a diacritic and the font you're using doesn't have it. What to do? Well, you could search through a bunch of different fonts to see if you can find one that includes the diacritic. But it may be easier to just add the missing element to the font you are using. Here's how: Drawing a diacritic is easy. Just open your font editor and add a new glyph. Diacritics are all very simple designs, so it shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to create the glyph. However, making the character that includes the diacritic is a bit more complicated. First you'll need to copy the base character to a new glyph window. At this point you could just copy/paste the diacritic glyph into the new base glyph character window. But frequently a diacritic is used in several letters in a script, so rather than reinvent the wheel for each new diacritic character it's more efficient to just reuse the same diacritic for each one. This has the additional advantage of having to edit only one glyph (the diacritic) later on if you decide to change the design.