Liga Diga

Liga Diga is a font that uses ligatures to automagically translate the top 300 most common English words into Spanish. Your days of using Google Translate are over!

Download it here: Downloads

How the build process works

npm start will run the build process. It works in 3 phases:

1. Copies the source code for a simple base font from src/Liga-Diga.ufo.base into a temp folder, tmp/Liga-Diga.ufo
2. Adds and modifies files in the tmp folder to add the ligatures and their metadata. Those files are based on templates that live in src/templates
3. Uses Google Fontmake (which is a dependency of this project) to compile the source files into .ttf/.otf font files.

...all of this logic can be found in src/index.js

The build process requires Node >=11.4 because it requires readline.Interface[Symbol.asyncIterator]

Notes

The font is a very simplified version of Fira Sans Regular. To simplify things for myself, I've removed all kerning data and most characters that can't easily be created via US keyboard or that aren't requried for Spanish.

src/index.js has some constants you can fiddle with at the top of the file the most important being the max number of ligatures generated.

The word list was translated in chunks via Google Translate, and then manually tweaked to remove words with punctuation. It includes over 5000 words, but Fontmake couldn't handle that many. It exists in this repo as 2 parallel text files, en.txt and es.txt where each line represents a word.

Credits

• Font data is adapted from Fira Sans by Mozilla
• Requires Google Fontmake
• English wordlist from this repo, specifically google-10000-english-usa.txt