Spritulo

About

Spritulo (English pronunciation sprit-OO-loh; Esperanto pronunciation [spritˈulo]) is a block-script handwriting font with massive multilingual support spanning Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic. It started as a project to create a modern handwriting font for Ancient Greek, but has since expanded to include a diverse character set supporting Vietnamese, Bulgarian Cyrillic, and the Shavian alphabet for English. It is based on the handwriting of the designer using a felt-tip pen, with some creative liberties and beautification added in.

The Cyrillic letterforms blend block-script versions with some cursive features.

Stylistic alternates exist for more casual handwriting forms in Cyrillic and Greek.

Examples

Specimens

Desk – multiple languages

Mockups

▲ Kitchen – Spanish and German
* The font supports the “e” mark.

▲ Chopsticks – Vietnamese
* Note that faux bold will look bad on letters with diacritics.

▲ Comic – English (Shavian Alphabet)
xkcd #1248 by Randall Munroe is licensed under Creative Commons

▲ Markers – Interslavic (Latin and Cyrillic)

▲ Detective game – Bulgarian

▲ Book – Dutch

▲ E-Reader – Ancient Greek (Polytonic Greek)

▲ iTunes – English

Name

Spritulo is Esperanto for “witticist” or “clever guy”. It is a compound word made of:

1. sprit(a) “witty”
2. -ulo [person characterized by said feature]

Kazimierz Bein a.k.a. Dro. Kabe, an early adopter of Esperanto, used this word in learning material. The translation below is my work:

— Bone — respondis la spritulo — ŝutu al ĝi avenon, kaj la ostrojn donu al mi, se ili ne plaĉas al mia ĉevalo.

“Well then,” responded the cunning man, “pour out some oats for it. And the oysters, give them to me if my horse doesn’t like them.”

— Extract from Aveno kaj Ostroj (Oats and Oysters), from Unua Legolibro (First Reading Book)

According to a paper called The Word Formation in Esperanto as Seen in Two Translations of Hamlet by Toshifumi Noro from the National Institute of Informatics (Japan), the word spritulo is used in both L. L. Zamenhof’s and L. N. M. Newell’s translations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Its Esperanto name continues the theme from my previous Google Fonts project, Orelega; Orelega is Esperanto for “big-eared”.

Known issues

• (The version of) FontForge (that runs fine on my PC) can only export a broken features.fea file. Loading it on FontForge removes all OpenType features except kerning. So FontForge exports for .ufo files are broken on my end. The latest project file is still the FontForge project (Spritulo-Regular.sfd).

Features

Writing system support

• Latin (incl. Vietnamese)
• IPA
• Greek (incl. Polytonic)
• Cyrillic (incl. Old Church Slavonic—though I’m not definitely sure, because I can’t find an exhaustive list of glyphs used in OCS)
• Shavian

Language support

116 languages detected by FontDrop!, which are:

Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Macedonian, Ossetic, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Greek, Afrikaans, Akan, Albanian, Asu, Bafia, Basque, Bemba, Bena, Breton, Catalan, Chiga, Colognian, Cornish, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Embu, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Ewondo, Faroese, Filipino, Finnish, French, Friulian, Galician, Ganda, German, Gusii, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Icelandic, Inari Sami, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Jola-Fonyi, Kabuverdianu, Kalaallisut, Kalenjin, Kamba, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Lakota, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Lower Sorbian, Luba-Katanga, Luo, Luxembourgish, Luyia, Machame, Makhuwa-Meetto, Makonde, Malagasy, Maltese, Manx, Meru, Metaʼ, Morisyen, Northern Sami, North Ndebele, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Nyankole, Oromo, Polish, Portuguese, Quechua, Romanian, Romansh, Rombo, Rundi, Rwa, Samburu, Sango, Sangu, Scottish Gaelic, Sena, Serbian, Shambala, Shona, Slovak, Slovenian, Soga, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Swiss German, Taita, Teso, Tongan, Turkish, Upper Sorbian, Uzbek (Latin), Vietnamese, Volapük, Vunjo, Walser, Western Frisian, Yangben, Zulu

Odds & ends

• Arrows: ← → ↑ ↓ ↔ ↕ ↵ ⇧ ⇪
• Math symbols: × ÷ ¬ ∀ ∃ ∅ ∇ ∈ ∌ ∛ ∝ ∞ ∧ ∪ ≈ ≟ ≠ ≡ ≥ ⊂ ⊅ ⊇ ⊈ etc.
• Currency symbols: $ ¢ £ ¥ € ₯ ₴ ₽
• Card suits: ♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♤ ♡ ♢ ♧
• Symbols and dingbats: № ★ ☆ ✓ ✔ ✕ ✖ ✗ ✘
• Musical symbols: ♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯, and 24-tone accidentals demiflat, sesquiflat, demisharp, and sesquisharp, both in the PUA according to SMuFL encoding, and the provisional Unicode encoding
• Obscure punctuation: ⸘ ‽ ⸨ ⸩
• Volapük umlauts: Ꞛ ꞛ Ꞝ ꞝ Ꞟ ꞟ
• Precomposed Roman numerals: Ⅰ Ⅱ Ⅲ Ⅳ Ⅴ Ⅵ Ⅶ Ⅷ Ⅸ Ⅹ Ⅺ Ⅻ Ⅼ Ⅽ Ⅾ Ⅿ ↀ ↁ ↂ ↇ ↈ
• European Union “estimated” mark: ℮

OpenType summary

• case Case-sensitive forms
• dlig Discretionary ligatures
• liga Ligatures
• lnum Lining numerals (Defaults are old-style)
• locl Localized forms (Romanian/Moldovan, and Bulgarian)
• locl Localized ligatures (Dutch/Flemish)
• ss01-ss02 2 stylistic sets
• kern Kerning
• ordn Ordinals (º and ª only)
• sups Superscript
• cv01-cv19 19 character variants

For details on OpenType features, such as cursive-style Cyrillic and Greek, and alternate numerals, please read opentype.md.

Ligatures

Unicode: IJ, ij, ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl

Non-Unicode (Latin): fj, ft

Non-Unicode (IPA): several tone contours

Non-Unicode (Dutch only): IJ with acute accent, ij with acute accent

Non-Unicode (Shavian alphabet): 𐑦𐑙 /ɪŋ/, 𐑩𐑯 /ən/, 𐑾𐑯 /iən/

About

UkiyoMoji Fonts is a label under which I (Haley Wakamatsu) release fonts, most of them available for free.

Building

Since this repository template does not support FontForge, fonts are built manually.

Changelog

(future release). Spritulo Version 1.00

• MAJOR Renamed from Stampatello Faceto to Spritulo to prepare for potentially breaking changes.
• MAJOR Added Greek handwritten forms.
• MAJOR Added the IPA tricolon and half-tricolon (crucial for vowel length marking).
• MAJOR Re-implemented OpenType substitutions.
• MAJOR Added more Cyrillic letters, like for Kazakh.
• MAJOR Added unique “seriffed” glyphs for uppercase Roman numerals.
• MINOR Added the alternate Volapük umlauts (ꞚꞛꞜꞝꞞꞟ U+A79A~A79F).
• MINOR Tweaked Vietnamese letterforms.
• MINOR Added more combining diacritics for IPA transcriptions.
• MINOR Added diacritic anchors to more letters for IPA transcription.
• MINOR Added characters for Old Church Slavonic.
• MINOR Added arrows and more math symbols.
• MINOR Added musical symbols and card suits.
• MINOR Added more kerning.

05 Dec 2023. Stampatello Faceto Version 0.02

• MINOR Added some kerning.
• MINOR Added certain Latin letters: capital schwa, capital turned E, capital ezh.
• MINOR Added certain Cyrillic letters: capital and lowercase barred O, Cyrillic equivalents of the Latin additions, and lots of letters plus one diacritic.

10 Nov 2023. Stampatello Faceto Version 0.01

• MAJOR Initial upload.

License

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is available with a FAQ at https://scripts.sil.org/OFL

Repository Layout

This font repository structure is inspired by Unified Font Repository v0.3, modified for the Google Fonts workflow.