forum

[Mia Kalish]

Andrew, you have done such a wonderful and complete job of covering all the issues and the details of those issues, that it seems that, Yep is too parsimonious. 

If you read my response to Bill, it has the general format, hopefully as well detailed as yours, of the nasalized, rising tone vowel issue. 

As well as functional, I think fonts should be pretty. Fonts have an ambience; I actually knew someone a few years ago who did her dissertation on the aesthetics of fonts, and how they contributed to people's responses to documents. It took her quite a while to wade through all that was involved, and she only used half-a-dozen fonts. 

Sorry to hear about @font-face. I tried the Embed TrueType fonts option in Word, and it works very well for everything but the subject line in email. To use it, you select Save As, then Tools/Save Options, and it's the 4th checkbox option in the first column. 

I have used it when sending documents for publication, and also in email for my friends who also have Word and Outlook. In Outlook, it’s Tools/Options. . . and then click the Save tab. And it’s right there, 4th item, with embedding options. 

Like: Here is Athapascan Naaki. I can install my template right here in the email, and then use it to insert all the characters: ąęįæų (nasals); áéíóú (rising tones with the little pointy-up-to-the-right guy); åëïöü (rt-n) see how they combine the diacritics? Then there are the other specials: ä (The “real” glottal that works as a character); ł (barred l); ń nasalized n, borrowed somehow from the Spanish, I think. And of course everything comes in CAPITALS: ĄĘĮÆŲÅËÏÖÜÁÉÍÓÚŁŃ 

Now if I send this, because I selected the Embed True Type fonts option, it should come to you okay. (I made it big so its easier to see . . .  )

Mia 

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU] On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham
Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2008 3:41 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

 

Hi Mia,

 

when you said "Apachean has special characters for the

high-tone/rising vowels which are not supported directly by Unicode."

I'd be interested knowing which Apachean characters are not supported.

 

I haven't played with flash much yet. Mainly working on web services,

web sites, most of my work is on internationalization architecture

relating to community languages. We prefer to build our sites so we

can throw any language at it. Although i want to do more work on good

classes and functions to handle language specific case-folding and

collation.

 

Unfortunately there is no real font embedding mechanism. CSS

introduced the @font-face command, and Netscape 4 and IE 4/5/5.5

played with it.

 

But the command was removed from CSS 2.1. We're currently waiting for

CSS 3.0 to provide a workable solution.

 

It is possible to embedded SVG fonts in SVG files, but the barrier

here is SVG plugins have limited support for the SVG font modules. SVG

could have been very good, but good browser support has been slow, and

many developers use flash instead.

 

Fonts are always a problem. The languages i work with may have only

one to five fonts available capable of correctly rendering text in

those languages. Added to that, we are limited by the capabilities of

the font rendering and text layout services for the operating systems.

 

The ability to use languages on computers has advanced greatly over

the years, yet there are still barriers and hurdles. probably one of

the reasons i use html and xml as a medium.

 

One of my side projects at the moment is writing documentation and

help files to assist African language clients on configuring their

computers to view African language content on the web. We're focusing

on languages that require combining diacritic support and diacritic

stacking.

 

Or languages that require alternative glyphs.

 

There are some really good, flexible fonts out there at the moment,

but the limitations are often at the OS or application level.

 

For one language (Moro) we require alternative glyphs for two

character pairs. The font Charis SIL has the alternative glyphs

available as an alternative (the opentype spec provides a mechanism

for accessing and using alternative glyphs) unfortunately most

applications do not provide a mechanism to access these features.

Indesign and WorldPad come to mind as possibilities.

 

WorldPad is very simple program, but useful in some circumstances. And

Indesign, although it supports alternative glyphs and ligatures very

well, doesn't handle diacritic positioning ... catch-22 as the

expression goes.

 

Getting fonts to installed on users computers either means the end

user has to down load and install fonts, or distributing keyboard

layouts or IMEs that have bundled fonts with them.

 

But then free keyboard layout solutions (Like MSKLC) are fairly

limited and unsophisticated, and not always suitable for our

requirements.

 

So often we provide a free solution (based on MSKLC) and a more

sophisticated alternative based on a commercial solution (Keyman

Desktop) which we can bundle other stuff.

 

Andrew

 

-- 

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator

State Library of Victoria

Australia

 

andrewc at vicnet.net.au

lang.support at gmail.com

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