Trace and Teach - educational font

I will be releasing an educational tracing font with starting positions and stroke arrows for kindergarten, beginners, teachers, workbooks, etc. SOON! (I know, often my "soon" turns out to be months or years or never. :P Please be patient.)

However, these fonts will not be free. I plan to release them as commercial fonts. I have been developing these of-and-on since 2003 and they have been a lot of work. Since creating these have been time and labor intensive, I want some return on investment. These fonts will be for sale.

Baybayin Modern Teacher fonts are TrueType fonts that assists young learners in printing Baybayin and Surat Mangyan letter shapes correctly and efficiently.  It provides lines containing dotted letters for students to trace with the starting position and stroke directions illustrated for each letter, and punctuation mark.  The fonts have been carefully developed to provide an intuitive, practical introduction to writing Baybayin and Surat Mangyan.

The fonts uses extended stroke direction arrows to discourage students from lifting their pencils between strokes unnecessarily so that students do not form disjointed letters. Learning correct stroke sequences improves penmanship and encourages students to get used to the cursive and wavy strokes of Baybayin.

Many students never learn correct penmanship because stroke sequences are seldom emphasized in the classroom during formative years. Then in later grades it is very difficult for teachers to correct poor writing habits that are already well encoded into students' procedural memory. Get it right the first time around with Baybayin Modern Teacher fonts!

Besides learning correct stroke sequences, teachers will find that the standardized, uniform, and simpler letter shapes of these fonts to be practical and easier for the students to learn. The typeface is a cleaner and simpler version of the Doctrina Christiana typeface. As always, I added of the set of alternative glyphs from my modern set and proposed reform. I added the modern RA and the kawi based JA, Mangyan pamudpod, x-kudlit, anusvāra, visarga, e/o kudlits, pallawa & padalaw-a marks, and other syllable-doubling marks; assigning them to the appropriate keys.

Baybayin Modern Teacher fonts works like other custom fonts. After you buy the font, you download the font file, and install it on your Mac or PC. Then you use whatever software (like Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint or other software like Interactive White Board (IWB) software) to create resources for your class, like tracing sheets or flash cards.

Examples:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fF1idxzcdkZIdMrmEhvKMYVvnIM9y0r6/view?usp=sharing

 

For most of Formosa

13-ICAL Epilogue

The 13th. ICAL (International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics), was held at the Institute of Linguistics in Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, last July, 18 to 23, 2015.

With the help and support of our fundraising donors, generous people, friends, and family, Mike Pangilinan and I were able to present our papers at ICAL last year. Mike and I greatly appreciate their help.

We and our papers were well received and praised by international linguistic scholars and professionals who were in attendance. Our presentations were on point and they went smoothly. I'm pretty happy with the reception and validation of my work by our peers.

Mike Pangilinan, as our panel leader, introduces me to the audience before my presentation.

I gained a lot of knowledge and experience from this conference. Attending and absorbing most of the presentations that I can catch every day of the event, I've learned much about various studies, methodologies, histories, practices, and projects relating to various Austronesian and Southeast Asian languages. All these knowledge can be applied to further continue our own efforts with Philippine scripts.

I also have met and spent time with the top international Austronesian & SEA language scholars and professionals during the event. Conversations with these great minds were extremely entertaining and enlightening. I got reacquainted with awesome people I've met previously in Tokyo. And I met new and amazing people and made friends with them in this venue.

Gained new important connections and expanded our network, finally met folks from SIL too. There were a couple of acquaintances from social networks whose work on Philippine languages I admire and follow for years; I met them in person for the first time at the conference. It was a bit surreal when we talked as if we've known each other for a long time.

Our papers and presentation slides can be perused at: ical13.ling.sinica.edu.tw/Full_papers_and_ppts

An excellent article in Enquirer.net by Eunice Barbara Novio gives further details about the overall purpose of our participation: inquirer.net/...2-filipinos-work-to-preserve-indigenous-writing-systems

Mangyan, Kulitan, and Baybayin fonts created for our 13-ICAL fundraising (will be released sometime soon):

Mangyan, Kulitan, and Baybayin fonts created for our 13-ICAL fundraising.

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Postscript:

It took me a while to recover from this trip (my health went on a decline the weeks and months following my return from Taiwan) and I was meaning to write about it earlier last year. Now, the time has come for another linguistic conference and I need to continue moving on to the next level.

Next stop, Manila!

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