The flat accents (diaeresis, tilde, dot) are floating too high above the lowercase letters in Kis and Linden Hill. They look like they were flying away (especially in italics) which is very distracting in languages that rely heavily on them (e.g. german, portuguese).

They haven't bothered me in Esperanto, which uses circumflex and breve heavily, but I do understand that the umlaut should be low in German. I have these things positioned to coordinate with the dots on the i and j. I haven't figured out how to approach these problems, yet.

Some publications use dieresis a lot in English, where I think a high dieresis might actually be preferable, though that's just me thinking about what I might prefer seeing. "The New Yorker" probably puts them wherever they happen to fall in Adobe Caslon or whatever it is they are using.

I’ve looked into some commercial fonts. Most of them set the diaeresis lower than the i-dot and all of them set the tilde lower than the i-dot—about as low as the cirumflex accent, some even lower due to the tilde’s form.

Adobe Caslon indeed has the diaeresis as high as the i-dot, but it is still below cap height, whereas in Kis it is at ascender height.

Some of the fonts have the diaeresis’ dots drawn a bit smaller than the i-dot. Perhaps this helps that they don’t look too strange in English text even if nearer to the base letter?

What I will likely do is make all the dots lower for Kis, since I have a lot of freedom there (though it is based largely on hot-metal Monotype Janson), and for Linden Hill I might let the i dots hang higher. That is, if I ever get back to it. :)

A lot of the older typefaces have high-flying dots on the i that are located to the right of the letter.

I have been waiting to see if someone thought it really mattered. I do take some shortcuts on account of physical disability; this is one reason that I use the comma accent as the cedilla. Cedilla can take many forms, supposedly, so I took the shortcut; plus I dislike an attached cedilla, anyway. :)

Ha, I was just about to complain about the cedilla :D

Perhaps a second, attached, form of the cedilla could be added as stylistic alternative and make it selectable by a stylistic set. At least for French, Catalan and Portuguese the commabelow accent looks odd.

No, the work is difficult enough for me -- try making fonts with chronic hand pain (among other maladies) and one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datahand

My policy is "Please, please, please steal my font!", but it is hard to get takers. I can't be a font foundry, even if I wanted to be. I want others to take what I started and make them better; forked projects would be better than trying to work with me.

If I were able to do the font work, I probably would be programming somewhere rather than making fonts, anyway. :)

An attached accent is harder, because the overlap has to be eliminated and so the accented letter, in general, cannot be built automatically, because the hinting is affected. For the Kis I am taking shortcuts, by having some of the f-ligatures made automatically and autohinted, so the same could be done with the cedilla; but I'm doing that with the ligatures to save me some work, but doing it with the cedilla would increase work by a little. Also, for the cedilla and comma accent, if they are different, a 'locl' feature has to be added for Romanian/Moldovan, which is just a little bit more work.

I started using near vertical acutes to save work, too; this way they are good kreskas for Polish and also are good for half of the Hungarian umlaut. Otherwise I would need separate accents for Polish and 'locl' features for Polish and its friends. If someone wants to do that, it would be an improvement, and I wish they would please steal my font and do it!

:)

I stole your font, as you requested ;) You find it at http://github.com/georgd/Sorts-Mill-Kis Development might be very slow, as I don’t have much time.

Excellent! I have put a watch on it. There shouldn't be too many technical difficulties, thanks to the existence of hg-git (buggy but functional, with some effort).

I myself am feeling the urge to return to font work. Mostly lately I have been migrating from Gentoo to Exherbo as my OS, and procrastinating on creating a fork of fontconfig.

BTW if you want to use the Python scripts, they create the accented characters automagically and are a little more sophisticated than what is built into fontforge. They also do the spacing and kerning, though slowly and with some gotchas. The interactive scripts and some library routines are in the "python" directory. The "make-fonts" scripts are how I create the otf and ttf files, rather than by using fontforge's user interface. None of these things is essential, but they create a workflow in which I don't have to use my hands too much.

I'm setting up a mirror of the entire sortsmill repository on github, which might make github easier to use. Just make a clone of the repository and work with that. :) (Though, unfortunately, fontforge .sfd files probably aren't the easiest things to merge.)

It's at http://github.com/chemoelectric/sortsmill

I lowered accents and put a connecting cedilla in Kis regular (along with OpenType "locl" code for Romanian/Moldovan). I made some outline adjustments, too, in the g, y, O and their variants.

The dieresis perhaps remains high for a German umlaut, but no longer seems much different from fonts like Adobe Caslon or Adobe Garamond.

The release of Linden Hill improves things in the regular weight roman and italic. Whenever I work on the bold (or bold italic) I'll take the changes into account, but in the meantime I'll treat the boldface as unsupported/experimental.