Arcphon Kalvalan

The Arcphon Kalvalan font presents a fantasy alphabet, encoded using the unicode standard for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It is intended for use in tabletop role-playing games, designed for the Five Axis Orb setting of my game After Sanctuary, as a way for the arrogant wizards of the setting’s Kalvalan Empire to transcribe any language. 

The typeface’s glyphs were heavily inspired by the Lierean typeface, by Adriaan van Liere. It is a similar idea of a fantasy font built to encode any language, but the Lierean font doesn’t use IPA unicode, instead making use of some multi-character tricks. (Had it been a unicode IPA font, I may never have built this one.)

Why “Arcphon”?

I’m inventing the term “arcphon”—a portmanteau of “arcane” and “phonetic”—to describe fonts that use IPA unicode for totally frivolous roleplaying game purposes, for two reasons:

1. It’s a meaningless and unused word that can be used for searching for fonts of this kind without too many false positives, so people into RPGs can easily find them.
2. More importantly, actual linguists looking for fonts that support IPA unicode can do a -archphon to filter out this sort of elf-game nonsense. 

Why IPA?

The point of the IPA is to represent sounds humans are capable of producing in speech. Even though it doesn’t quite manage this—and has no characters for sounds that non-human fantasy species, like dragons or naga, might be capable of producing—there are a lot of tools for using the IPA out there, most of them useful for producing content for role-playing games quickly. So, rather than invent some new phonetic system for RPGs, IPA unicode is useful enough.

Some tools that are very helpful for using arcphon fonts include:

• toPhonetics allows you to type in words in various real-world languages, and get an IPA unicode transcription. You can copy that transcription into your software, then apply an arcphon font like this one to it.
• IPA Reader allows you paste IPA unicode, and hear what it sounds like, using any of dozens of voices.
• Online keyboards for typing IPA.

Typeface Characteristics

Vowels are the only characters with ascenders, and all contain a line ascending and descending fully. This actually decreases legibility a little, because the vowels tend to set the “look” of a word instead of the consonants. The position of the vertical line intends to match the front/central/back position of the vowel in your mouth, while the height of a crossing line matches the open/close.

Consonants have a simple character for each fricative place, and each other manner has a stroke that is layered onto the fricative of the same place to create a character for that place/manner pairing. Compare, for example, the glyphs for the “approximate” manner to the “fricative” glyphs in the same column (place) of the IPA chart, each adding the same descending line, like so:

The font contains separate glyphs for the manner “add ons” in the "private use" Unicode range (characters ED01 to ED09; see the IPA-codes.html file, below).

Dots are used to differentiate between voiced and unvoiced, if necessary.

Files

The zip archive contains these files:

• ArcphonKavalan.otf: The open type font file. There are no bold or italic variations.
• ArcphonKavalan.sfd: The source file, used in ancient software like FontForge.
  
• ipa-chart-arcphon-kalvalan.pdf: A PDF that shows the typeface in the standard IPA layout.
  
• IPA-codes.html: A simple file that, if opened in the same directory as the OTF file, should show all of the symbols in the font, the corresponding IPA character, the decimal and hex values of the unicode character, and the character’s meaning.
  
• license.txt: The SIL Open Font license used for this font.