Relative Character Heights

In multilingual documents, differences between the heights of letters in Ethiopic script and its companion foreign script are often found. The difference is likely an artifact of the typesetting technology in use and does not represent the intent of the author or publisher. In the classic typeface style of Ethiopic script the letters will be of variable heights. Fixed height styles are more generally used for advertisement and not publishing. The nature of variable height Ethiopic letters is a factor that complicates how to best align letter height with a foreign script.

At a given point size, letter heights within a script may vary widely between typefaces. This adds another level of difficulty to aligning heights between scripts as an alignment will only be optimal between a specific typeface pair. Within a script featuring variable (not fixed) height letters the relative heights of letters are subject to change between typefaces. This phenomena reinforces the previous assertion on typeface pair optimization, but also introduces the possibility that alignment optimization can be language sensitive. This happens when an alignment pair designed for the letter inventory of one language is applied to another language that includes letters that exceed the heights of the optimized set.

The relative heights of letters used in different languages may also change with typeface as this next figure illustrates.

With these caveats considered, “Zen” alignment is a means to optimize an Ethiopic-Latin typeface pair that is suitable for a general use case when priori knowledge of a document language is unknown. Its basis is reviewed here. The Latin letter “Z” and Ethiopic letter “ን” are chosen as pairing symbols representative of the mean height . They both feature broad horizontal strokes that are easy for the eye to follow as a nearly continuous stroke. Ethiopic letters that were introduced as an extension to the Ge’ez core will typically feature a macron or other modifier at the top of a base letter in order to form the extension letter. The macron necessarily extends the height of a letter. Using the top of the macron for the reference height of a letter leads to height alignment that makes the majority of Ethiopic letters appear too short against Latin letters.

A better approach is to align Z with caron (Ž) against ን with macron (ኝ) while aligning and Z with ን and find typefaces with a good tuple of aligned pairings.

Going further, we may assume that the ኝ and Ž will align satisfactorily (optionally check any irregularities) and simply align the Z-ን pair. Phonetically the sequence of these two letters would sound like “zen”, hence the name.

Relative Typeface Weights

A common practice in Ethiopic literature is the change of typeface weight in one script to appear more visually similar to the other. Most typically a Latin typeface will be made heavier to better match its Ethiopic counterpart. This weight increase is demonstrated in many Ethiopic fonts that include Latin letters. The font designer may have increased the weight of the Latin range primarily to provide heavier weight punctuation to use with Ethiopic script (see Ethiopicized Punctuation).

Literature produced with a heavier Latin typeface may represent the author’s stylistic sensibilities but, in some cases, may only be a pragmatic outcome when an author finds manually changing between fonts too burdensome. The view of professional publishers is unknown here and should be determined.

Baseline Alignment

It is not uncommon to observe mid-sentence baseline changes in interlingual documents produced with pre-digital typesetting systems where Ethiopic and Latin text, for example, would appear to be laid out along different baselines in a line of text. The most common example of this appears in documents produced with a typewriter where a sheet of paper had to be moved between typewriters to produce a line in two scripts. An apparent baseline difference here would be the result of mechanical misalignment.

Note: The only point that seems can be made here would be to state that Ethiopic and foreign scripts should share the same baseline. This may already be the case with computer typography. If so, this section should be removed.

Punctuation Used in Ethiopic

In Classical era Ethiopic up to nine punctuation marks can be found. Though rarely, if ever, would all nine be found in a single document. The Classical Ethiopic punctuation inventory may appear to be larger in number as a result of bi-chromatic rendering which can be applied to any punctuation and in several different styles. However, the bi-chromatic forms do not change the syntactic role of a given punctuation. In the Modern era, a third of the punctuation marks: ፧, ፨, and ፠ have largely fallen into disuse while a number of punctuation marks from Western practices have been adopted. Bi-chromatic punctuation is now reserved for spiritual materials and remains a calligraphic practice.

Ethiopic punctuation segments text and is non-enclosing. The Ethiopic word separator, labeled “Ethiopic Wordspace” in the Unicode standard, is given special attention in this section as follows more complex rules of interaction with other punctuation as well as justification. Ethiopic punctuation is often aligned with similar English punctuation though these associations must be understood as approximate. Ethiopic fullstop and wordspace are highly regular in their application, others, particularly ፣, ፤, and ፥ will be consistently used within a document but their roles may change between authors or institutes. A detailed review of punctuation semantics is beyond the scope of this document, however Ethiopic comma is given special attention in the following section.

The following descriptions of Ethiopic punctuation usage has been translated from Gebre and Shewaye.

Adopted into Ethiopic writing practices are enclosing punctuation such as parenthesis, brackets, single and double quotation marks and guillemets. Expressive punctuation such as question mark, exclamation point, inverted exclamation mark, and ellipsis are also incorporated into Ethiopic practices. Additional foreign symbols that denote currency, time, mathematics, or communicate with Internet protocols (e.g. "@" , "://") have also been adopted as over the last century as international communication grew.

The ES-781:2002 standard identifies the following inventory of western symbols to be used with Ethiopic:

1234567890 ? ! ¡ . / () [] {} < = > \ # % & _ - + ± × ÷ ‘ ’ “ ” ‹ › « »

Additionally the following punctuation is observed to be used with Ethiopic writing:

$ : , € @ …

Inverted exclamation mark is repurposed and utilized differently than in its Western usage. In Ethiopic writing the inverted exclamation mark is known as “Timirte Slaq” (ትእምርተ፡ሥላቅ) appears at the end of a sentence and will denote sarcasm. All borrowed punctuation is subject to typeface alignment with Ethiopic weights and shapes, an aesthetic enhancement discussed in this section as “Ethiopicized Punctuation”.

Ethiopic Comma Usage

In Ethiopic writing practices three encoded symbols will be used in the context of comma, however they are generally not used together. Looked at another way, the Ethiopic comma may appear with three different glyphs. The western comma also has an important role in Ethiopic writing. Usage rules are as follows:

፣ - ነጠላ ሠረዝ

U+1363 ETHIOPIC COMMA (አማ/ ነጠላ ሠረዝ, ትግ/ ንጽል ሰረዝ) is used as a comma in Ethiopian practices and as a semicolon in Eritrea. “፣” will also be used in Ge’ez writing as a semicolon (is this a modern usage or classic?). U+1364 ETHIOPIC SEMICOLON, ፤, in turn is used as a colon in Eritrean writing (verify).

፥ - ንዑስ ሠረዝ

U+1365 ETHIOPIC COLON in contrast to its Unicode name, is never used as a colon in any known Ethiopic practices. Rather, it is a classical glyph variant of U+1364 ETHIOPIC SEMICOLON (፣). ፥ is the default comma glyph in Ge’ez writing and is the preferred comma glyph by some modern writers writing in other languages. ፥ is the default comma in most Amharic bibles, likely in keeping with the Ge’ez Bible that the Amharic would have been translated from. Some modern Bible translations into Amharic, as well as other religious literature, will use ፣ as the default comma in prose but maintain ፥ for passage references, e.g. ማቴ4፥23 , ዮሐ13፥16 , etc. Given this common usage in religious materials “ecclesiastical comma” is a practical English term for referring to the ፥ glyph variant. As mentioned already, writing experts Desta Tekle Wold, Kidane Wolde Kifle, Dereje Gebre, and Tesfaye Shewaye all attest to the equivalence of the two symbols.

፡ - ንዑስ ነጥብ

U+1361 ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE (አማ/ ሁለት ነጥብ, ትግ/ ክልተ ነጥቢ) in keeping with Ge’ez heritage, is used as the word separator (i.e. space) in the classical writing practices of both Eritrean and Ethiopia. In modern Eritrean writing practices ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE will be used in the role of a comma (illustrated in Figure ). When used in modern Ethiopian writing, it retains its classic role as word separator (space). See for elaboration on this topic.

, - comma

U+002C COMMA is utilized in Eritrean and Ethiopian writing practices in the formatting of western numbers only.

Ethiopic Wordspace in the Context of Comma

In recent decades some communities have adopted a practice of employing the wordspace symbol as a comma when U+0020 SPACE [ ] is used as the word separator. The interpretation of the symbol is then dependent on the context of the writing convention in use by the author. Accordingly, an application user setting could be offered to set the symbol context.

An alternative view point on this practice is that U+1363 ETHIOPIC COMMA [፣] is in fact in use by these user communities; however its glyph has decayed whereby the line segment is lost and so it visually coincides with U+1361 ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE [፡]. Under this perspective, a simple solution would be modify an Ethiopic font for these users (perhaps adding an alternative glyph in an OpenType stylistic set) where the Ethiopic comma character address and semantics remain intact though the visual form has been tailored to meet aesthetic needs.

Ethiopicized Punctuation

The shape and weight of adopted symbols are often changed for a better visual fit with an accompanying Ethiopic typeface. Enhanced foreign symbols are referred to here as “Ethiopicized”. While many symbols are borrowed from western writing, not all necessarily benefit from Ethiopicization. Those that do will primarily be used in a context where the foreign symbol directly abuts some Ethiopic symbol. Common Ethiopic symbols are demonstrated in the following figure:

Optical Balancing

Foreign language words or phrases are regularly found inline within a paragraph of Ethiopic text, often bounded within enclosing punctuation such as brackets and quotation marks (e.g. []()""''«»‹›). This practice is most often observed in news articles on international topics. The weight of the enclosing punctuation may be found as matching either the Ethiopic or Latin weight. The preference of stakeholders must be determined here. Comparative samples follow:

As a rule within the embedded foreign script, the weight of punctuation and other symbols (numbers, etc) should be in keeping with the weight of the foreign text and not that of the surrounding Ethiopic.

Ethiopic Wordspace Alongside Other Punctuation And Line Breaks

It modern literature where punctuation may be borrowed from Western writing, inconsistent formatting practices are found with respect to the presence of Ethiopic Wordspace (፡) alongside borrowed punctuation. It is helpful to establish rules for Ethiopic Wordspace in the presence of other symbols so that software grammar and formatting checkers can offer corrections leading to better quality and more consistent literature. The following rules are proposed:

• A letter or number may border either side of Ethiopic Wordspace.
• Ethiopic Wordspace may appear before, but not after, an opening punctuation, such as: ( , [ , { , « , ‹ , “ .
• Ethiopic Wordspace may appear after, but not before, an closing punctuation, such as: ) , ] , } , » , › , ” .
      Example:
          Incorrect: … ፅፋት፡(ፅፍዓት፡)፡ከመ፡ኪደተ፡ንስር፡(እንደ፡አሞራ፡ፈጣን፡)።
                          … ፅፋት፡(ፅፍዓት፡)ከመ፡ኪደተ፡ንስር፡(እንደ፡አሞራ፡ፈጣን፡)።
            Correct: … ፅፋት፡(ፅፍዓት)፡ከመ፡ኪደተ፡ንስር፡(እንደ፡አሞራ፡ፈጣን)።
  
• No other punctuation may border Ethiopic Wordspace.
• A new line may follow, but not precede, an Ethiopic Wordspace (a wordspace may not start a new line).
• Whitespace may not follow or precede an Ethiopic Wordspace (note, this does not include stretchable space used in line justification).
• An Ethiopic Wordspace followed by another Ethiopic Wordspace must be interpreted as an Ethiopic Full Stop (።).

Space-Wordspace Substitution Rules

Rules are presented here to aid layout software that would offer the functionality of space symbol conversion to and from Ethiopic wordspaces. This functionality is desirable in a viewer application (e.g. web browser, eBook reader) to make the same substitution as per a user preference. Thus the user would be able to read a document with Ethiopic wordspaces that was composed and delivered with white space. Likewise in the reverse, a user who preferred white space could have their preference supported in a document that encodes Ethiopic wordspaces only. Similarly, this functionality would be useful to users of an editor application.

[TBD: Test cases should be developed to validate these rules. Apply screenshots of test cases to help illustrate the requirement that a rule addresses.]

Space to Wordspace Transformation Rules

1. White space symbols other than space (U+0020) are not processed. Issue: how should non-breaking-space be handled?
2. Space(s) at the start of a line are assumed to be there for positioning and are not processed.
3. A sequence of one or more spaces is treated as a single space.
4. Space(s) are substituted for wordspace when bounded by letters, or between a letter and number.
5. Space(s) are substituted for wordspace before or after enclosing punctuation as per the convention applied in Ethiopic Wordspace Alongside Other Punctuation and Line Breaks.
6. Space(s) before or after non-enclosing punctuation are removed.
7. Space(s) bounded by non-Ethiopic numbers are not processed.
8. A wordspace will be appended to the end of line (a line ending with a hard return) that does not end with punctuation.

Wordspace to Space Transformation Rules

1. A sequence of more than two wordspaces is not converted as the author’s intent is indeterminate.
2. A sequence of exactly two wordspaces is converted to an ETHIOPIC FULLSTOP (U+1362).
   Note: This conversion is suggested as an auto-correct feature.
3. A sequence of exactly one wordspace is convert to space.
4. A wordspace at the end of a line may be removed.

An additional wordspace conversion rule that is independent of the above space-wordspace substitution rules: Very commonly in Ethiopic documents a sequence of two wordspaces are found and may be substituted for Ethiopic fullstop. This may be considered a defect correction rule.

Ethiopic Gemination Mark (ጥብቅ) Vertical Positioning

The Ethiopic gemination mark, ጥብቅ, is almost universally found at a fixed height above the baseline in typeset literature. The mark’s position must then be fixed so that it remains above the tallest Ethiopic letter symbol; this produces a variable height gap between the top of the letter and the mark. Conversely, when the symbol is hand written (often above typeset text) the mark will be found at a variable height above the baseline and demonstrating a fixed height above the letter symbol. Quite possibly the former style is an artifact of a limitation of the layout technology employed, and the later representative of an author’s desired rendering.

Parenthetical Expressions

Parenthetical expressions are found regularly in modern Ethiopic writing and will apply any of the enclosing symbol pairs: // , () and [].

Quotation

Classical Ethiopic literature applying quotation marks will employ double guillemet (« ») in a primary style and single guillemets (‹ ›) in a secondary style. Single guillemets will be used for inner-quotation and single word quotation. Modern Ethiopic writing will additionally utilize Latin quotation marks similarly (“ ” ‘ ’, U+201C, U+201D, U+2018, U+2019). The choice of Latin script quotation may represent either an author preference or a software limitation that made guillemets unavailable or difficult to access.

Ellipsis

Both punctuation-baseline and raised ellipses are found in Ethiopic literature. In Ethiopic publishing ellipsis may have anywhere from 3 to 6 dots used regularly. The presence of one style over the other may simply be an artifact of the publishing technology and not necessarily in line with the publisher's preference.

Rules of Applying Whitespace in Ethiopic Text

When Ethiopic Wordspace (፡) is used to separate words, there may still be some valid application for white space “ ”. White space is permissible to support the following formatting needs:

• Indentation.
• Following a counter suffix.
• Within a numeric sequence, like a phone number.
• Within a date format (sometimes, not always).
• Within a scripture reference (sometimes not always).
• Before and following quotation marks.
• Following an ellipsis (?).
• Within a block of embedded foreign script.

[TBD: Image samples needed]

Ethiopic Numeral Bars

Sequences of Ethiopic numerals, such as years and page numbers, may be written in one of two styles. In the most common style in modern literature the numerals are written as discrete, independent, symbols. In a second “joining” style of writing, primarily found in calligraphic text and handwriting, the numerals may share a common upper and lower bar. Conceivably the joining style went out of favor as it proved more difficult to support in publishing technology. Modern preferences should be determined from stakeholders.

Ethiopic Numeral Vertical Alignment

In the Ethiopic numeral system a single symbol may represent a numeral with an order of magnitude in the power of 0, 1, 2 or 4. This feature of the numeral system leads to several potential layout possibilities when numerals are arranged vertically.

Ordinal Notation

An ordinal is formed in Amharic when “ኛ”, and in Tigrinya when “ይ”, follows a cardinal number. The ordinal marker is often, but not always, rendered in superscript form. The superscript practice is most prevalent with ordinals in western numerals, but is also applied with Ethiopic numerals.

Emphasis Within Prose

Italic applied to Ethiopic has been experiment with since the arrival of desktop publishing. Earlier in the 20th century, a typeface change to a pre-20th century style would be applied in place of italic. Underlined text was introduced to Ethiopic publishing in the earlier 20th century and was well established by mid-century. It is not uncommon to find the underline “Ethiopicized” whereby the weight is made heavier to correspond with the greater weight of Ethiopic letters relative to Western weights.

Ecclesiastical Emphasis

In religious literature, certain words or phrases with a spiritual or more holy aspect may be rubricated (inked in red). The practice is context dependent and a word rubricated in one sentence may not be in the next (or elsewhere in the same sentence).

Emphasis With Ethiopic Wordspace

As a rule, a wordspace following a word that is emphasized in some way (color, bold, italic, underline, etc.) shall receive the same emphasis. This is in keeping with the Ge’ez literature tradition.

Justification When SPACE is the Word Delimiter

When space (U+0020) is used as the word separator in Ethiopic text, the line spacing rules applicable to western text may be applied to meet user expectations.

Justification When ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE is the Word Delimiter

Since the arrival of the printing press in Ethiopia in 1863 (Pankhurst, 1998), full justification of Ethiopic has been a common typesetting practice in Ethiopian, and later Eritrean, publishing houses. Earlier, Ethiopic justification rules are a feature of Hiob Ludolf’s Historia Æthiopica, which is noted as the first use of movable type for Ethiopic script (Ludolf, 1681). Prior to letterpress typography, calligraphic manuscripts rendered on parchment also featured full, or approximately full, justification. Though the latter likely reflects the scribe’s desire not to waste a millimeter of available lateral writing space.

The placement of Ethiopic wordspace presents a complication to the justification of Ethiopic text. Two placement styles developed in typeset literature which will be referred to here as “word bound” and “centered” styles. Additionally, the word spacing following an Ethiopic fullstop may (or may not) be governed by a special rule and in combination with the two wordspace spacing styles. These spacing rules are discussed in the following sections.

Justification with Word Bound Wordspace and Punctuation

In keeping with line justification for Latin script, the non-printed or “blank space” (space and gaps) between words is treated as stretchable. The width of the space symbol itself will be elongated to some aesthetic width value that may vary from space symbol to space symbol across a printed line. In Ethiopic justification, the blank space between the Ethiopic word separator and the words it separates is likewise allowed to stretch. This stretching of blank space may be either symmetrical (“centered”) or asymmetrical but in the latter case space stretching is always between the right-side of the separator and the following word –referred to here as “word bound”.

In “word bound” justification the word separator, which may be either a punctuation symbol or U+1361 ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE [፡], appears to adhere to the word to the left as if it were its final character. Figures and both illustrate the word bound style.

Justification with Centered Wordspace and Punctuation

In the second major form of Ethiopic justification the blank space around word separators is stretched equally on both the left and right sides; giving the appearance of the separator being centered between the words it divides. depicts the "centered wordspace" justification style, which applies equally for other punctuation.

To further illustrate the justification spacing applied to both Ethiopic punctuation and wordspace, presents blank space stretching from the point of view of the symbol’s typographic bounding box. Here the “design blank space”, the space between the visible symbol and the box border, is itself stretched as needed to meet line justification:

Spacing Threshold Following Full Stop

In the regular mode of Ethiopic justification (both forms), U+1362 ETHIOPIC FULL STOP [።], will be treated equally with all other punctuation symbols. In a second mode, the Ethiopic full stop will have special spacing rules applied to it whereby more separation space is allowed following the symbol and the start of the next word. In a sense, the right side space of the full stop is “more elastic” than in the regular mode. The elasticity rule and the visual effect are similar to that of the final line of a fully justified paragraph in Western text. When the final line of a paragraph of Latin script crosses a certain horizontal threshold, the line will become fully justified. Below that threshold the line will appear left aligned. The same rule appears to be applied to the Ethiopic full stop but on any line of the paragraph. An illustration of this sub-mode is depicted in the following:

Shortcomings Found in Electronic Typesetting Systems

To date, computer software that typesets text has applied justification rules for blank space stretching that were designed to meet publishing requirements in the Western world. When the same rules are applied to Ethiopic text, the results are unsatisfactory as they do not meet user expectations. Largely responsible for the formatting dissonance when Western justification is applied to Ethiopic text, is the absence of a white space symbol in the writing system. There is no explicit white space symbol (in classic Ethiopic writing) to be “stretched”.

Formatting algorithms will then process U+1361 ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE [፡] as a punctuation symbol where word enclosing rules, rather than word spacing rules, will be applied. While still stretchable, “white space” in the Ethiopic wordspace is implicit rather than explicit. For a complete solution, software will ultimately need to be enhanced to stretch implicit space as required. Reclassifying the Ethiopic wordspace as a “Zs” symbol is expected to help alleviate justification issues and clears the way for software firms to implement comprehensive support for Ethiopic justification. Since the Ethiopic wordspace interferes with justification in present day software, authors may opt not to use it or may “pad” wordspace and Ethiopic punctuation with explicit white space to produce the desired justification style (i.e. Word Bound or Centered). To properly render text formatted in this way, future “wordspace aware” software, should elide spaces bordering Ethiopic wordspace and punctuation when producing justified text.

The following samples depict formatting of Kidane Wolde Kifle’s seminal work Maṣḥafa Sawāsew with a popular word processor (Kifle, 1955 (1948 EC)) under the limitations of Western spacing rules justification.

In digital documents such as in web pages and eBooks, it is recommended that the appearance of either U+0020 SPACE [ ] or U+1361 ETHIOPIC WORDSPACE [፡] be configurable as a user preference. An easy to access “space” toggle button would enhance a viewing application’s usability.

Bullet Lists

Bullet lists are utilized regularly in Ethiopic literature. Authors using a computer or typewriter will work with the list marker symbols made available by their software or machine. Many marker, or “bullet”, symbols are accepted for Ethiopic literature though not all will be considered optimal. Some creative writers have even recently applied ፨ and ፠ (U+1368 ETHIOPIC PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR and U+1360 ETHIOPIC SECTION MARK respectively) as list bullets. The following samples compare common bullet shapes and sizes with example lists:

Ordered List Counter Suffix

In Ethiopic ordered lists a number of symbols are used for the counter suffix. For example: "/" , "፦" , "." , ")" and even "፡" (Ethiopic Wordspace).

Counter Suffix Alignment

Ethiopic corpus will present lists with two styles of alignment. These are a left side alignment at the list counter, or alignment along the counter suffix. Layout software will align a list at the suffix in keeping with the later style. The former style (left justified at counter) may reflect a limitation of the layout technology employed and not a preference of the author, copy editor or typesetter. A depiction of these two alignment styles is presented in the following figures:

Inline Lists

Inlined enumerated lists are commonly found in Ethiopic documents. Inline lists will follow the same sequences as regular lists. However, the spacing after the counter suffix may be different. Typically a regular keyboard space is observed following the suffix, if any. This is most likely a matter of convenience for the author and not necessarily representative of good formatting.

Numbered Lists

Ethiopic literature will apply ordered numbered list using both Ethiopic and Western numeral systems. Ethiopic numeral lists are addressed in the Ethiopic Numeric Counter Style section of the CSS Counter Styles Level 3 specification.

Alphabetical (ሀለሐመ) Lists

The Unicode standard encodes Ethiopic syllables for many languages using Ethiopic script past and present. Alphabetic lists are commonplace in Ethiopic literature, but will conform to the letter inventory of the language of the surrounding content. The W3C’s Internationalization Working Group publishes alphabetical counter style code snippets for a large number of languages using Ethiopic script. Many of these lists are believed to be only hypothetical and based upon the letter inventory of the identified languages; but may not have been used in practice. The alphabetical counter styles specified here encompass a smaller collection of languages with a demonstrated requirement as found by example in corpus or have come from stakeholder input.

Abegede (አበገደ) Lists

The አበገደ ordering of the Ethiopic syllabary is an alignment with the Coptic and Greek alphabets possibly to facilitate interdenominational communication or for the transfer of gematria practices. The ordering is used today largely for pedagogical purposes and has been used by some authors for the collation of entire works such as dictionaries. More often authors will apply the ordering for list orders.

The አበገደ ordering is potentially desirable to any language using the Ethiopic syllabary. The ordering is less likely to be found in the writing practices of languages that have a written tradition of under a hundred years. The language specific orders shown here are only those found utilized in corpus.

Inline End of List Continuation

An observed formatting practice is to begin a paragraph on the same line with the last item in a list. The paragraph may flow immediately from the last item, or some indentation may be applied. This practice is illustrated in the following figure:

Preface Page Numbering

Increasingly, modern authors and publishers are adding additional front matter sections (see Document Structure) and moving "page 1" out to either the መቅድም or መግቢያ. Prior to "page 1" preceding pages may be numbered in one of two ways. In the first convention where pages are numbered with Ethiopic numerals, the preface numbering may be alphabetic in the ሀለሐመ counting system or in the አበገደ sequence (for example in Desta Tekle Wold's “ዐዲስ፡ያማርኛ፡መዝገበ፡ቃላት።”).

In the second convention where pages are numbers with Western numerals, the preface page numbering will apply Ethiopic numerals. Under both conventions the preface page number begins on the first printed page after the cover.