Legacy Fonts:
What did I inherit?

• The Syllabic Legacy
• From Old to New
• Keyboard Layouts
  • Prosyl
  • Nunacom
  • Naamajut
  • AiPaiNunavik
• Long Vowels
  • Prosyl and Nunacom
  • Naamajut
  • AiPaiNunavik
• Aujaq
• Help!
• Boring Technical Notes

One Font’s Trash
is Another Font’s Treasure

You enter a site that’s supposed to be in syllabics, and everywhere you turn it’s wobEJm/4v d/8NDm9lQ9l wo8ix3=1u and x}=x6g4nsZlx3Lb xg6t5tJ8N3mb. Or you open a document and at first sight you think there’s a problem with your word processor. Welcome to the legacy font. For historical background, see the Fonts and Input page. If all you want to know is how to deal with the garbage—preferably by getting rid of it once and for all—read on.

Would you believe the better-known legacy fonts are still available for download? It isn’t even that hard to find them. Just pick a font name, add the word “download” and plug into the search engine of your choice. In one fell swoop I picked up AiPaiNunavik, Naamajut, Nunacom and ProSyl. Oh, and both versions—Mac and Windows—of the enthusiastically named AUJAQ.

If you’ve got a slab of text and no clue what it’s supposed to be, try changing the font in your text editor or word processor until it comes into focus. Or proceed directly to your friendly neigh­bor­hood trans­coder and let it do the work for you.

Back to top

The Transcoder is Your Friend

Where there are legacy fonts, there are transcoders. For UCAS, I use the one at Inuktitut Computing. Along with the most common legacy fonts, it handles the various encodings that you may meet in raw HTML or percent-encoded URLs.

There is nothing complicated about a transcoder. It simply takes each letter of the original and changes it to the letter it’s “supposed” to be. At worst, it may have to look for letter pairs—or even triplets for a handful of long vowels in Nunacom. But when you are set up to deal with HTML entities (ᐄ) or percent-encoded URLs (%E1%90%84), it will take more than a |w, `w or ™ to throw you off your stride. They all resolve to the modest ᐄ.

Here’s the quirk: what you see will depend on whether you actually have the legacy font you’re working with. Converting into Prosyl will give you either a string of garbage, or lovely readable syllabics. But if you copy and paste those syllabics into anything that isn’t set for Prosyl by name, your text goes right back to alphabetic chaos. Better convert to proper Unicode and be done with it.

Back to top

Keyboard Layouts

These are the four main families of legacy fonts: Prosyl, Nunacom, Naamajut and AiPaiNunavik. Aujaq is shown on a page of its own. The first pair of illustrations shows shared key assignments. You’ll notice that most of those shared characters are also the same in modern Unicode keyboard layouts—except Inuktitut-QWERTY, made for people like me who didn’t grow up typing syllabics. In all fonts, the number keys (unshifted) are used for syllable-final consonants. The shifted version gives the numbers themselves.

For the overall design of these illustrations I used my own keyboard (Mac Bluetooth). Keys for a few non-alphabetic characters may have been in slightly different places on older keyboards—for example, next to the space bar, or in a row by itself. But the basic arrangement is always the same.

punctuation marks (unchanged)
key assignments shared by all font families
key assignments shared by Prosyl, Nunacom and Naamajut

Shared Characters

Prosyl

Prosyl was one of the most important pre-Unicode syllabic fonts. In particular, it was used for the Inuktitut versions of the first few years of the Nunavut Hansard. It can also be found at the Nunavut Court of Justice site (last updated late 2002) and at the Pulaarvik Kablu Friendship Centre.

Keys shown as a gray box with raised dot are the long-vowel marks.

Plain:

Shift:

Nunacom

Nunacom may have been even more widely used than Prosyl. You are most likely to have seen it in the Inuktitut version of Nunavut ’99. This is another of those classics whose authors seem to have forgotten all about it. I finally got fed up and transcoded two pages myself so they would be available—and searchable—to modern readers.

Other sites that still use Nunacom include NITC (Nunavut Implementation Training Committee), the Taloyoak Project, and Ilisaqsivik Family Resource Centre. Nunacom also shows up in the archives or older pages of many sites that now use Unicode. I’ve found it hiding in:

. . . and that’s just from a preliminary search.

As in Prosyl, keys shown as a gray box with raised dot are the long-vowel marks.

Plain:

Shift:

Naamajut

I’ve never found anything written in Naamajut, but it must have been pretty common at one time. It’s one of the three non-Unicode options available at the Living Dictionary—a legacy in its own right.

Plain:

Shift:

No, you’re not seeing double. The Naamajut font had two parallel sets of characters that both match the Unicode ᖏ (ngi) series. Since I’ve never seen the font in action, I don’t know whether this was Naamajut’s version of the double consonant ᙱ (nngi) or some other letter entirely. The ᙱ series doesn’t exist in its own right, though the syllable-final ᖖ does. So the series could have been made either by attaching ᖖ to ᒋ, or, Prosyl-style, by combining ᓐ with ᖏ to make ᓐᖏ.

I don’t know what was on the blank keys. Either my copy of Naamajut has holes in it, or those positions were really unassigned.

AiPaiNunavik

In spite of its name, AiPaiNunavik doesn’t seem to have used a French keyboard. Note especially that ᖏ and ᐃ correspond to q and w, not a and z.

Plain:

Shift:

Are you looking for the ᙱ (nngi) and ᖠ (łi) series? They’re hidden among the long-vowel forms, accessible only with the aid of the Option or Alt key. Nor is that all. Unlike the other legacy fonts, AiPaiNunavik included both the ᕵ (“Nunavik H”) and the full ᐁ (ai or e) sequence—hence its name. And, to wrap things up, it had the rarely-seen ᐞ. Officially this is the glottal stop, as uttered in Kivalliq and points west. But it also shows up as j, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find ᐊᐞ as an alternative to either ᐊᐃ or ᐁ.

Like Naamajut, AiPaiNunavik used the “spectacled” form of the ᖐ series. But here it appears instead of, not in addition to, the ordinary ᖏ design.

Back to top

Long Vowels

Now it gets messy. AiPaiNunavik and Naamajut (below) used precombined long vowels: ᐄ and ᖒ and the others are all single characters, as in Unicode. ProSyl and Nunacom used raised dots, five or six per font. Even AiPaiNunavik had a raised-dot character—and Naamajut had two—but it was just to keep the fonts from feeling left out. The dots don’t seem to have been used for anything, except maybe as an emergency backup.

The dots are “non-advance” characters that print on top of the following letter, as on a typewriter. Or, at least, that was the theory. The practice sometimes fell short.

Long Vowels in Prosyl and Nunacom

Prosyl used five raised dots; Nunacom had six. The extra is because Nunacom had two different dots for low-profile characters like ᓂ and ᕆ, while Prosyl made do with one. Unfortunately, the first four aren’t the same either. The difference wasn’t crucial: some typists probably used the middle dot (Prosyl `, Nunacom |) for everything. Or typed it in that way and then did some global replaces. A quick look at a random issue of the Nunavut Hansard suggests that the typists were fairly capricious in their long-vowel choices. Some dots don’t seem to have been used at all.

Prosyl	key	position	key	Nunacom
	>	far left	]	**
		left	}	**
	`	middle	|
	]	right	+	**
*	<	far right
	~	lower	`
			~

Back to top

Long Vowels in Naamajut

Disclaimer: I know very little about Naamajut, beyond the obvious fact that it’s a Mac font. Much of what I do know comes from trial and error, since it isn’t included in my favorite transcoder. And, finally, most of the details are only interesting to people who have been Mac users since the very beginning. If you still remember the transition from System 6 to System 7, the Naamajut page is for you.

For everyone else, here are the character correspondences as far as I’ve been able to work them out.

That � is not a mistake. Long ᕘ ought to match the  character—codepoint F8FF, in a Private Use Area. Instead it ended up on the Unicode Replacement Character, codepoint FFFD. It probably started out as a character in a Mac-only range; AUJAQ has the same problem.

Finally, there are two dots, like other fonts’ long-vowel marks. The high one corresponds to ˇ (hacek, just as in AiPaiNunavik); the low one is at ˛ (ogonek). Neither of them seems to be a non-advance character, though.

Back to top

Long Vowels in AiPaiNunavik

Like Naamajut, AiPaiNunavik had pre-combined long vowels. But that’s about all they had in common. So far I haven’t been able to find out for sure if AiPaiNunavik was a Mac font, using the existing dead keys, or whether it came with its own keyboard. If you type it on a Mac, some of the most convenient keys are used for assorted punctuation marks. This points pretty strongly to pre-existing dead keys.

Meanwhile, let’s not even try a keyboard layout.

There is one character I haven’t shown: a raised dot, just like in Naamajut. It even corresponds to the same character, ˇ (hacek). There was only one of it, but it held itself high—far too high to be used as punctuation.

Back to top

Aujaq

The legacy font Aujaq is both extremely rare and unusually complicated to explain. So I’ve put it on a page of its own.

Back to top

Help!

If you have a font-related question and can’t find an answer, drop me an e-mail. I may or may not know, but it can’t hurt to ask. Conversely, let me know if you have infor­mation that you think belongs in this group of pages.

Back to top

Questions? Comments? Complaints? Corrections?
Contact the webmaster.

If you must know . . .