sitelen pona versions

[alifeee]

please read this thread for context: https://discord.com/channels/795288348024373289/1220965092456271933

if you are feeling helpful, please summarise the above thread into bullet points of:

• why is making a sitelen pona version hard?
• what is involved when making a sitelen pona version?
• what should be done to make it easier?

[theflyinggriffin]

It looks like the biggest issue mentioned in the thread is needing a font that has all of the obscure glyphs. I think this is solved by both of these fonts:

https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/sitelenselikiwen/
https://www.kreativekorp.com/software/fonts/fairfaxponahd/

which seem to have everything you could ever want.

other issues I can think of include:

• Generating a cartouche for names would be obnoxious by hand
• Ignoring everything in parenthesis would be hard with any font that has ligatures that convert Latin text into glyphs

Based on these issues, I am building a tool to convert the text directly into unicode characters for the versions of the fonts above that don't have ligatures. It will:

• convert Capitalized names into cartouches using predefined glyphs for each letter
• ignore numbers, white space, and text enclosed in parenthesis
• not use any compound glyphs (for now)

[sona-tau]

toki a! It seems that the link to the thread no longer works, which means I am not sure what the overarching context for this is. However, today I found out that just changing the font for the text in scribus will automatically render the sitelen pona.

Steps

1. Put an otf file of whichever font you want: nasin nanpa font in your project directory.

• Maybe it would be a good idea to have a /fonts directory in the project directory to keep the project directory clean of the font files.

2. Go to File > Preferences > Fonts > Additional Fonts and add the directory where you just put the otf font.
3. Change the font in "Content Properties" for whichever text frame you want to convert.

I mentioned nasin-nanpa because I find it aesthetically pleasing but I have tried this with other fonts like linja lipamanka and it also works.

P.S.

There's a chance that, since I can't read the thread you all mentioned, this was already discussed. However I still want to help out in whatever I can to convert the issues into sitelen pona. Since this bug tracker is linked to directly on liputenpo.org it would also be beneficial to have a short "How to convert to sitelen pona" in here for other people that would like to contribute.

Happy new years!

[RetSamys]

There were discussions about this, on and off

It looks like the biggest issue mentioned in the thread is needing a font that has all of the obscure glyphs. I think this is solved by both of these fonts:

Well... yes, maybe... Just from my personal vibes: a handdrawn font doesn't fit the feel of lipu tenpo for me, and Fairfax HD is a bit... blocky when it's used in larger texts. A while ago, I compared different fonts and decided that maybe linja waso as a base font and FairfaxHD for additional glyphs could work well together. Note that I only compared the fonts (I looked mostly at flat line ends and line weight), I didn't actually test it out in a text.

Also note that I am willing to edit fonts, including merging fonts, adding ligatures to non-ligature fonts, and adding automatic cartouches for capitalised words.

[RetSamys]

How to convert to sitelen pona

Hm, just like, in general? There are 2 ways.

1. use a font that uses "ligatures" to convert toki pona words into sitelen pona glyphs. Some additional formatting is needed for punctuation (ignoring punctuation, for the most part), names (in all but 4 fonts, making cartouches is always manual work), and styling (like long pi and dealing with oddities like aaaaa).

2. convert every word in the text into a codepoint (this is usually done either by necessity because the fonts has no ligatures or because it's useful to switch beyond multiple fonts). Usually gets automated, so while writing a script, the addition formatting (same issue as in 1) can be taken care of too

[sblom]

Below is a summary of the discord thread linked in OP.

I'm currently enthusiastic about attempting this, and I'd like to get a working group together to tackle nanpa lon (most recent) or nanpa len (upcoming). Leaning toward nanpa lon since it's probably more productive to develop our method against a fixed target instead of a moving one.

Channel on lipu tenpo Discord? Subthread in pali-ale?

I think we can build ourselves a style guide as we resolve situations that we encounter.

Aspect	Problems / Why Hard	What’s Involved	Ways to Make Easier
Formatting & Layout	Text is more compact → paragraphs look too small; awkward line breaks; vertical alignment is tricky	Decide rules for line breaks (before/after particles like li, la); avoid breaking modifiers from heads; balance columns and spacing	Standardize rules (e.g., consistent breaks, avoid splitting modifiers); allow creative freedom in layout; consider smaller page sizes (A6)
Fonts	No single font covers all words; ligatures missing; mixing fonts risks inconsistency	Testing Fairfax HD, linja waso, linja insa; fallback fonts for missing glyphs; possibly extend Andika style	Develop/extend a sitelen pona font in Andika style; combine fonts pragmatically; enable ligatures in Scribus
Cartouches (Proper Nouns)	Authors may prefer specific cartouches; editors must guess if none provided	Collect preferred cartouches; default to pu-style if unknown	Ask contributors to submit cartouches with articles; vote or agree on defaults for non-authors
Tools & Workflow	Scribus/InDesign handle fonts differently; ligatures are finicky; recreating older editions is labor-intensive	Use Scribus with ligature settings; fallback to InDesign for older editions; explore LaTeX/Typst automation	Automate typesetting with LaTeX/Typst; adapt fonts to support ligatures more reliably
Aesthetic Consistency	Sitelen pona looks different from sitelen Lasina; punctuation rules unclear	Avoid exclamation marks; use one punctuation style; vertical alignment where possible	Simplify punctuation rules; adopt “good enough” solutions rather than perfection