History of the Development of Linux Libertine Arabic Numeral Glyphs

The two FontForge .sfd files in this repository contain the different versions of arabic numeral glyphs through time, as recorded in its SVN Repository. It therefore only covers the subset of development that took place between August 2008 and the last revision (166) of September 2011.

I have also added the glyphs of the last released version of Libertine under the fake revision number of 170, however. There is unfortunately no available record of the intermediate changes between 166 and the released version (or I have been unable to find that record).

The file figure_history.sfd records the full-size glyphs and the file small_figure_history.sfd records the smaller glyphs used in super- and subscripts and fractions. These are not “normal” .sfd files and need to be viewed/understood in the following way:

1. All glyphs are “unencoded” and therefore appear at the bottom of the FontForge viewing window. You should not use the Encoding → Compact option, however, and instead scroll down.

2. Set your main window so that it is 16 glyphs wide. That way the different groups of glyphs should all start on the left.

3. The different groups/lines roughly correspond to different faces in the following order. (The parenthesized strings are those used to differentiate the styles in filenames at various points of development.)

   1. “Display” (DR, aDRS)
   2. “Display Italic” (aDRL)
   3. “Regular” (R, Re, C, C_Re, Sc, aS)
   4. “Italic” (It, RI, ISc, aSI)
   5. “Slant” (Sl, aRL)
   6. “Semibold” (RZI, aSZI)
   7. ”Semibold Italic” (RZI, aSZI)
   8. ”Semibold Slant” (BSl, aBL, aZL)
   9. ”Bold” (RB, BSc, Bd, aBS, aZS)
   10. ”Bold Italic” (RBI, BI, BiSC, aSBI)
   11. ”Bold Slant” (BSl, aBL)
   12. ”Outline” (I)
   13. ”Mono” (M)
   14. ”Underline” (U_Re)

   The correspondence is rough for several reasons. One is that this mapping is the result of guesswork on my part. Another is that sometimes a new stage of development started by copying the glyphs of another face. There was also a point in development where what had been called ”Bold” became ”Semibold”, and my mapping does not capture or correct for that change.

4. Glyphs are displayed in order of revision from most to least recent. Every glyph on a line is different from every other glyph, although sometimes only subtly.

5. The Comment for each glyph—shown in the second entry of the Element → Glyph Info ... window and (when it is working) the tooltip when hovering over a glyph—includes the filename-identifier/revision pairs that glyph appeared in.

6. Note that the only revisions represented are those in which a given .sfd file changed. When a file did not change in some revision it will not be listed anywhere.