Typesetting African languages

[Ɔkyeame Kwame]

Typesetting African languages

Report of an investigation
by Conrad Taylor
Cover of report

Front cover of the report; the map shows where some 90 languages are spoken, and the four language family groupings as coloured zones.

First text page

First page of the report main body, which is illustrated with many diagrams, screen images etc.

A character repertoire page

A sample page from the character set appendix; this page shows the requirements of the West Atlantic language Wolof. Characters in red pose a special difficulty and usually require custom letterforms; accented vowels in green can be set with existing fonts.



This Web page provides a description of the 54-page document "Typesetting African languages" which I prepared in May 2000, a list of contents, and links by which to download an Acrobat PDF version either in whole or in parts.

I have recently had some voluntary involvement in the work of a London- based health project for people of recent African origin, such as refugees and first- generation immigrants. Through this contact I came to consider the problems of providing printed materials such as publicity and health information in African languages.
The problem...

Africa has over 2,000 indigenous languages, of which about 100 have more than a million speakers. Of this hundred, only about six or seven are spoken by more than ten million. So a language-map of Africa may be described as a "large quilt of small patches".

Most African languages with a writing system use a modification of the Roman alphabet; the systems were often the invention of Christian missionaries, though some have been devised by government commissions since decolonisation.

The "authors" of these new writing systems usually aimed to make spellings logical and consistent by providing a written sign for each consonant or vowel sound in the language, and this often led to the adoption of newly- created letterforms that are easy to write by hand, but are not available in standard fonts for typesetting.

In West Africa, many languages are tonal: the relative pitch of successive phonemes is significant in word- identification. Thus, some languages use tone marks above vowels (and w, y, m & n may be vowels in the African context). This also can cause typesetting problems.

Finally, in the Horn of Africa, the languages of Tigré, Tigrinya and Amharic are written in the unique and ancient Ethiopic script, now effectively a syllabary requiring well over a hundred glyph shapes.
The scope of the report

In writing up this report, I have aimed it at readers who do not know much about how typesetting is handled today in PC-based "desktop publishing" and word processing systems. I have aimed to explain the issues, and some solutions, in simple language and with a wealth of illustration.

Five steps of difficulty are identified, and each language occupies one of these steps. On the first two steps, languages can be typeset with existing fonts and software, and can also be sent via email or used on Web pages. On the last two steps, special fonts are a definite requirement; the Ethiopic scripts also require additional software support to facilitate input, but can be used with standard DTP and WP software.

The "third step" languages have no special letterforms, but require accents to be placed in positions not supported by standard software. These too are probably best served by custom font solutions, but I show -- with an experiment of typesetting in the Yorùbá language of Nigeria -- that they can be typeset using any TEX typesetting system (see below).
Sample of Yoruba typesetting

It proved to be very difficult to track down reference sources that identify the character sets required by each language; the best sources were dictionaries and language primers, located on obscure shelves in libraries and bookshops. The report ends a series of appendix pages showing the character set requirements of 18 African languages, including special letterforms where necessary. These languages are: Baule -- Chichewa (Chewa, Nyanja) -- Edo (Bini) -- Fulfude (Pular) -- Hausa -- Kikuyu -- Krio -- Igbo (Ibo) -- Oromo (Galla) -- Somali -- Swahili -- Tswana -- Twi (Akan, Fante, Ashanti) -- Wolof -- Xhosa -- Yoruba -- Zulu.
Table of Contents

African languages and writing systems

* A large quilt of small patches
* "Written African"; indigenous scripts
* Alphabets introduced by missionaries

Fonts for typesetting African languages: the issues

* Five levels of difficulty in typesetting
African languages by computer
* What is a font? And what's in it?
* Standard repertoire character sets (Mac & Windows)
* African typesetting using standard fonts
* "Level 1 & 2" languages and the Internet

Typesetting African languages with TEX

* Introducing TEX
* Glueing accents to characters
* TEX in practice (an example of Yoruba typesetting)
* Preparing the typesetting file
* Typesetting the file
* Some notes and conclusions

Obtaining modified fonts for African languages

* Using a font editing program
* Purchasing a specially-engineered font or 'superfont' set
* The Summer Institute of Linguistics extended-latin fonts

The Ethiopic script system

* Background, history and use of the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script system
* a complete solution from EthiO Systems,
illustrated with their Web pages

Appendix A: Font technology notes

* PostScript font format
* Origins of TrueType
* The role of Unicode
* The OpenType project

Appendix B: Character sets for some African languages

Separate pages on: Baule -- Chichewa (Chewa, Nyanja) --
Edo (Bini) -- Fulfude (Pular) -- Hausa -- Kikuyu -- Krio --
Igbo (Ibo) -- Oromo (Galla) -- Somali -- Swahili -- Tswana --
Twi (Akan, Fante, Ashanti) -- Wolof -- Xhosa --
Yoruba -- Zulu.

(Each page also has some general notes about language use, the typesetting difficulties involved if any, and possible solutions.)

Downloading the Acrobat (PDF) files

These PDF files are compatible with version 3 and 4 of the
Adobe Acrobat Reader, but version four is a safer bet.
The file sizes are quite large because the report is heavily
illustrated and has been converted to PDF with only lossless
compression to maintain quality.

The pages were designed for printing to ISO A4 paper.
All required fonts are embedded.
Afrolingua_full.pdf

This is the full report, including introduction and table of contents
and both appendices including the character repertoire charts.
It also has a front cover.
[ 1,759,699 bytes ]

Afrolingua.pdf

This is the report text with introduction and table of contents,
Appendix 1 and the introductory page of Appendix 2.
There is no front cover image.
[ 697,545 bytes ]

charsets.pdf

This is Appendix 2 only (character repertoire charts
for the languages listed above).
[ 828,717 bytes ]