nunacom Font

More info from Elling Lien

I love how sometimes an obscure pastime can help you solve a practical problem.

I'm the Communications Manager with a food security nonprofit, but in my free time I like to fool around with font design. The fonts I make are mostly bad hand-drawn ones, but I like them, and it means over the years I've learned my way around font design software. I can make something that people can use. It's pretty fun.

Anyway, this week at work I'm redesigning a document meant for Baker Lake, Nunavut. The raw text has been translated from English to the Kivallirmiut Inuktitut dialect, and my job this week has been to lay it out.

The translator used Nunacom, an older syllabic font which doesn't seem to have a bold or italic version, and it doesn't easily convert to the newer, fancier syllabic fonts like Pigiarniq and Euphemia (http://www.pirurvik.ca/en/productions/iu-computing/font-download). I wanted the layout to be nice, so I plunked Nunacom into FontLab, ran a few quick actions, and in a short time I had a bold and italic version to work with.

So, to anyone out there who needs these, here you go. I don't claim copyright on the original http://www.nunavut.com/nunacom/ or these versions. I can't even claim that they work as they should! But I wanted to put them online in case someone is able to use them.

PS: I don't speak or read Inuktitut (but I'd love to learn!) so if there are any problems with this file, I'm the one to blame. Get in touch with me if you come across any and I can see if I can fix it.

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