Testing accents for Almanac Text 2.0
Almanac Text 2.0 adds Central and Northern European languages. How we tested the accents, and what we got wrong at first.
Almanac Text 2.0 covers Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, the Baltic languages and the Nordic languages, which brings the family to about 440 glyphs per style.
Adding a language is more than drawing new accents. Each one has habits: Polish readers expect the ogonek to attach to the letter rather than float under it, the Czech háček on a ď or ť becomes an apostrophe-like mark, and Romanian uses a comma below ș and ț, not a cedilla.
How we tested
We set the same three texts in every language: a news article, a recipe and a list of street names. Native readers marked anything that looked wrong. The first round of comments was mostly about the háček: ours was too small at text sizes, and on the capitals it collided with the line above.
What to do with it
If you set multilingual documents, the Almanac Text page has a glyph table with every character. Paste a sentence in your language into the tester to check it before you buy.