Considerable Progress on the Katnae Syllabary

I've been working on a syllabary for Katnae, my conlang spoken by space pirates that I have done Lexember in for several years running. It has progressed in fits and starts over the last few weeks, but has now reached a stage where I can call it a draft of a writing system at least, if not a complete one (not that any conlanging project can ever be complete). There is now an orthography page in the Katnae language documentation, although other aspects of the language remain unfinished.

More recently (a couple of days ago), I started putting chracters together to see whether the script looked the way I thought it would for actual text. While there are still a lot of unknowns — including the direction that the characters will ultimately go in on the page (the examples I have played with so far assume the same left to right, top to bottom scheme as the Latin alphabet) — I'm surprisingly happy with what I have so far. The glyphs themselves would probably be a pain to write by hand, but (as explained on the Katnae orthography page) Katnae writing has been 100% digital for generations, rendering that particular concern moot.

As an example of what the script looks like in actual use, this is the chorus from the Katnae "attack song", which they sing while closing in on ships they intend to raid:

In the ordinary romanization, that would be:

There are a handful of words there that I don't want to commit myself to translations of yet, so I would rather hold off on doing a full translation, despite having a basic idea of what it means. However, soura is a noun meaning something like 'squadron', maqa is a verb meaning 'to surround' or 'to close in on' (with the continuous aspect marker -te), and osil is a transnumeral second person pronoun very similar to English you with a suffix marking it unambiguously as the object of the sentence.

Writing plain SVG code still feels like the most practical way to tweak Katnae syllables for now (especially now that basic forms exist for all of them), but it isn't very usable once I have images of the characters — I have to copy and paste the inner parts into a larger file if I want to write anything in the script (that, or position a bunch of letter images using CSS). At some point I'm going to have to write a script that converts a string of syllables in a file into an image of the text, but that is a task for another day. (People on BlueSky are encouraging me to make an actual font, but that's an even larger task for another day — but I still might at some point!)

This is the kind of project that advances in fits and starts, so I'm unlikely to keep making progress at a consistent rate. I would like to use the Katnae writing system in a conscript relay at some point, though!