[Lexicog] UNICODE

[Beth Bryson]

On Sep 13, 2005, at 9:59 AM, Mike Maxwell wrote:

> Jimm GoodTracks wrote:
>> ...The key is to have easy and reliable application software programs
>> available, in order to do the conversions without it becoming a chore.

A good example of this is SIL's TECkit toolkit:  
http://www.scripts.sil.org/teckit

It provides a language for describing the mapping (in a regular 
expression language that is not hard for linguists to learn), 
standalone tools for applying the maps to different kinds of documents, 
a macro for applying them within Word, and an engine that can be built 
into other apps that want to apply encoding conversion.  There is good 
documentation with it, and sample encoding conversion tables.

Once someone writes a map for a given legacy font, it's easy to share 
that with others or to make it publicly available.

A TECkit map can serve as documentation of the choices that have been 
made about how to represent a language in Unicode.

And once that encoding has been agreed upon, then anyone who gets that 
document can view it with the characters it was intended to be viewed 
with, even if they don't have the original font.  The Unicode standard 
provides a way for minority language data to be shared much more 
reliably than with legacy fonts.

And the Unicode consortium is committed to encoding all of the 
characters that are in languages that are in use.  There are large 
numbers of special characters for minority languages that have been 
encoded in the standard, and more being added.  From my perspective, 
this seems to place a higher value on those languages and scripts.

-Beth



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