As Collletttivo turns eight, we reflect on years of incessant design and research—and look ahead to many more. Our passion remains as strong as ever, and our daily work continues to focus on making typography more inclusive and accessible.
Throughout the years, several members of our team have challenged themselves to design beyond the standard “A to Z”. We encountered numerous challenges in the process, and found a clear need for specialized tools to expand and improve our design workflows.
As a result, we've developed a set of tools designed specifically to ease the process of including, testing, and validating extended character sets in order to support various languages and writing systems. These tools are now openly available and we invite designers and developers to use, modify, adapt and improve them.
word-o-mat v4.0 a
Word-o-mat now auto-builds the list available in the drop down from the file system. The plug-in now has two drop-down menus: one to select the writing system (Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, N’Ko and Tifinagh at the moment) and one to select the language (we added Farsi, Bulgarian, Russian, Bambara, Romanian, Maninka, Tifinagh). We invite fellow designers and developers to help us review and expand the word lists.
Wordlist builders
If you want to build a dictionary yourself and have a source PDF file you can use these set of scripts to extract words by Unicode Range, by Specific characters or by font and color.
definitive (?) CustomFilter
A one-stop-shop file to compare your font's character set to new and old industry standards, including standards from Apple, Microsoft, Linotype, Monotype, Adobe, ISO and the more recent Koeberlin and SharpType.
mark and mark2mark feature helpers
Not at all a definitive solution but a quick way to write some mark features to test attachments for minority writing systems on the fly.
“Perhaps the free font movement will continue to grow slowly, along the lines in which it is already taking shape: in the service of creating typefaces that sustain and encourage both the diversity and connectedness of humankind.”
Ellen Lupton, 2006