Bar-less “f” and finetuning existing characters

Question

Specific question

I would like to produce an italic f without the crossbar. Can I do this relatively straightforwardly?

This letter, esh (ʃ), is Unicode U+01A9, U+0283. The esh of tipa.sty only looks good with Computer Modern—I’m need it in Times—and, like all tipa characters, it lacks an italic version. The picture below shows that the resulting mishmash: improper kerning (fixable, I know), wrong thickness of stem, and terminals (bobbly bits at top and bottom) insufficiently circular.

All these problems would go away if I could just create a character identical to f in all respects, but without the crossbar. (This would obviously affect ligatures as well and I realize that I would need to address each ligatured f separately.)

General issue

Linguistic typography falls well below professional standards (even from some of the top publishers): linguistics demands lots of odd symbols (IPA, dialectological, etc.) and these must be italicized in main text (which may be Times, Minion, or other). However, tipa, the main means of accessing IPA in LaTeX, does not offer italics and exists only for Computer Modern. The fact most tex users are therefore forced to submit manuscripts that mix different fonts and shapes then meets the problem that publishing houses have not all invested in the right font sets or have not trained their copyeditors/typesetters to use them.

This might be more avoidable if there were (at least the bare bones) of font-independent specifications for (italic and roman) characters like ɳ (U+0273), ɲ (U+0272), ʁ (U+0281), and so on, which users could tweak to their personal ends. In consequence, general answers to the f question are just as welcome as specific ones.

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Update. The “General issue” is now a separate question.

Answer 1

I don't know anything about fonts, so I can't fully answer the question. However, a workaround might be to use kpfonts and replace your f's with s's. The following code gives:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[nofligatures,veryoldstyle]{kpfonts}
\begin{document}
\emph{osten ossing}
\end{document}

It is likely that if the character above is suitable, then someone with the required low level knowledge will be able to turn this into an "automatic" solution for you (ie. no need to mess around with s's)

Answer 2

Based on Scott H.’s pointer, I can give myself an italic esh by coopting an italic long s as follows. (The general issue—about creating characters from existing parts—remains. I’ll post a separate question about that.)

After invoking kpfonts.sty, I redefined \ss (as I don’t need ‘ß’) as a one-argument command:

\renewcommand{\ss}[1]{%                line 1
     \fontfamily{jkpvos}\selectfont%   line 2
     s#1%                              line 3
     \fontfamily{jkp}\selectfont%      line 4
     }%                                line 5

Line 2 switches into veryoldstyle, which makes long s available. Line 4 switches back out again. Line 3 puts s and the following character into veryoldstyle.

The point of making \ss a one-place command (line 1), rather than just calling long s, is to accommodate ligatures. For instance, \ss t gives the ligature shown in Scott H.’s answer and in the picture below. (This does mean, though, that you’ve got to watch out for \ss followed by accented characters: \ss\k{i} won’t compile; you have to go for \ss{}\k{i}, or similar, instead.)

The example below shows that s gives s (no need for =s, which would be a pain, as I want plain es much more than esh).

Other points:

• As Barbara Beeton notes, there is esh-i no ligature in this font. Strange.

• The Polish hook aligns properly with italic vowels (not the case in mathpmtx amongst others). That'll save a load of manual fiddling.

• Italic v, w, y are kinky. I’m not a fan and would like to go back to Times. So, I’m still interested in a more general solution to building characters out of existing bits.

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\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{kpfonts}

\renewcommand{\ss}[1]{\fontfamily{jkpvos}\selectfont s#1\fontfamily{jkp}\selectfont}

\begin{document}

\noindent \it 
s\ss t\ss{}\k{i}\ss{}\k{\'i}s \\
vwy

\end{document}