Ethiopic

texish sets the Ethiopic script — Amharic, Tigrinya and Ge’ez — and it is the one non-Latin script here that needs no shaping at all. It is written left to right, so there is no bidirectional reordering; it is not cursive, so there are no joined forms; and unlike every Indic script it has no dependent vowel signs to reorder or position, because the vowel is written into the letterform itself.

That is what makes it a syllabary rather than an alphabet. Where Devanagari writes a consonant and hangs a matra on it, Ethiopic has a separate letter for each consonant-and-vowel pair: a base consonant and its six vowel orders are seven distinct characters, drawn as variations on one shape. The cost is a large character set — some 350 letters in daily use, spilling out of the main block into three more — and the saving is that one codepoint is one glyph and nothing has to be rearranged. Ethiopic text takes the plain path through the engine and breaks at its spaces, exactly as a roman paragraph does.

The Ethiopic font

An Ethiopic face, Noto Serif Ethiopic, is bundled in a regular and a bold cut. Select it with \font ethiopic, or with the aliases \font amharic and \font tigrinya, which name the same family:

{\font ethiopic 14 regular
አማርኛ በኢትዮጵያ የሚነገር ቋንቋ ነው።
}

{\font ethiopic 18 bold ሰላም!}

The face covers the Ethiopic block along with the Supplement and both Extended blocks, so it reaches past Amharic to Tigrinya, Ge’ez and the smaller languages of the region. (As with the bundled Hebrew, Arabic, CJK and Indic faces, the in-browser Scala.js build does not ship the Ethiopic font, to keep the download small.)

The seven orders

A letter’s vowel is written into its shape. Each row below is one consonant through its seven orders — hä, hu, hi, ha, he, hə, ho — and the family resemblance down each row is the whole design of the script:

{\font ethiopic 16 regular
ሀ ሁ ሂ ሃ ሄ ህ ሆ
ለ ሉ ሊ ላ ሌ ል ሎ
መ ሙ ሚ ማ ሜ ም ሞ
}

Nothing about this needs the engine’s help: each of those is one character in memory and one glyph on the page.

Punctuation and numerals

Ethiopic has its own marks and its own numerals, and they are typed literally — no ASCII shorthand produces them:

The numerals ፩ ፪ ፫ ፬ ፭ ፮ ፯ ፰ ፱ ፲ are letters in their own right rather than positional digits, so they are typed as characters and not built from ASCII digits.

The face also carries Latin, so a document can set a roman word or a page folio without dropping to the fallback face. Because it sets left to right like a Latin text face, the TeX-style punctuation shorthands work in it too: `` and '' become curly quotes, --/--- en/em dashes, and ... an ellipsis.

Setting a paragraph

A whole Ethiopic paragraph needs nothing beyond selecting the font — the line breaker finds its breaks at the interword spaces exactly as for Latin.

{\font ethiopic 12 regular
እያንዳንዱ ፊደል አንድ ተነባቢና አንድ አናባቢ አንድ ላይ ይዞ ይጻፋል። ስለዚህ የፊደሉ ቅርጽ ራሱ አናባቢውን ያሳያል።
}

The bundled scripts/ethiopic-demo.script sets a full page covering each of these features.