forum

[Mia Kalish]

Hi, Andrew, 

I think it's a bit of all of them. Apachean has special characters for the
high-tone/rising vowels which are not supported directly by Unicode. I build
a lot of Flash movies for language learning, although I haven't really
gotten past the basic lexicon stage yet. (Sigh). 
I think you can embed the fonts in HTML and XML documents now, yes? I have
developed a dozen ways of getting documents on the web with the correct
characters, and have gotten away from trying to rely on what's on the user's
computer. Of course, there have been stunning changes in the 9 years since I
have been grappling with this. 
You can check out my site at http://learningforpeople.us and tell me what
you think. In the Mescalero Library piece, we actually used Apache in the
menus. We were able to do this because the program we were using converted
the text to bitmaps. We didn't have to do it manually, so this made it
doable for us timewise. 
I think in a lot of the things we do in language revitalization materials
development is not an issue of whether we "can" do something these days, but
of "how much time it would take if we did it this, that, or the other way. 
Lastly, my philosophical goal when I engaged the effort was to make it
possible for tribes to develop their own resources. As in software, it is
lengthy to tell someone what you want, wait for them to create it, check to
see if its right and make changes if its not. I have a story, actually, that
puts it in context: 

One day, I was in the Mescalero library and a small child came in. She was
so tiny she had to crawl up into the chair. But she did, and she started up
Word. She wrote "Happy Birthday" in what was to become her card. She then
went through every, single, one of the hundreds of available fonts, finally
settling on Old English. Then, she went through all of the Word Art options,
several times, finally settling on the rainbow effect. She finished her card
but putting in the recipient's name, and then her name. Finally - it was
four hours now since the child had climbed into that chair - she slid out
and came to where I was sitting. Very shyly, she asked if I could help her
print her card. I could, and did, and that child left the library in the
demeanor of holding something very precious. 

This story was years ago, but when I really have to tell someone why I work
so hard at developing access for people, to language, to technology, in
current time, I remember that child. 

Mia 
  
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 10:10 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

Hi Mia,

if I understand correctly, your Apachean issues, aren't so much to do
with Unicode, but with software implementations

As a rule I tend to work more with HTML and XML documents rather than
word processing documents since i have greater control over locale,
collation, normalization, casing, etc.

With word processors you're really stuck with what the developers
choose to implement, and with the time scales it takes to get any
change from vendors.

Thankfully for most of the languages i have to support their are open
source fonts available we can use, distribute and in some cases modify
if required, esp. for some of the Sudanese languages we support which
use variants to the default glyphs normally available.

Input is fairly straight forward these days. Just annoying that
Windows is so tied to fixed input locales

Our biggest barrier are minority ethnic South East Asian languages
which need the font rendering and layout systems to be updated or need
the scripts to be added to the Unicode standard.

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
lang.support at gmail.com