LL-L "Technical" 2003.03.01 (06) [E]

Sat Mar 1 22:43:15 UTC 2003

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From: R. F. Hahn <admin at lowlands-lnet>
Subject:  Technical

Gary Taylor P.S.ed (under "Etymology" today):

> ps. hints as to how I can see the characters correctly
> would be appreciated - I know you've (Ron) already
> said this, but until now I've been trotting off to an
> internet café and have only now got internet access on
> my own computer.

Hey, Gary, ma meyan!

Whatever email program you use, see if you can switch the encoding mode
(usually under "Options" or "Preferences") to Unicode UTF-8, and, if
possible, designate to it a Unicode-equipped font.

For your benefit, and perhaps for the benefit of others, please find bits
from earlier postings below (all stuff I wrote).  I hope this will help you
and it'll work for you.

And mazl tov on getting your own Internet access!

Cheers!
Reinhard/Ron

***

LL-L "Language use" 2002.09.13 (03) [E]

> But how about Cyrillic letters? Should everyone move to Unicode?

I think this is in the offing, is already possible and it would really
be advantageous.  Our archive hosted by LINGUIST
(http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html) already
converts everything to Unicode.

All one has to do is switch one's programs encoding mode to Unicode
after installing one or more Unicode fonts.  One such font is Arial
Unicode, and another one is Lucida Sans Unicode.  These are
proportionally spaced fonts.  Does anyone know of a generally (gratis)
available fixed-width Unicode font?

Unfortunately, Microsoft has removed Arial Unicode from their free
download webpage.  (However, go to http://www.magic-live.com/fonts/ and
find ARIALUNI.TTF and LSANSUNI.TTF.)

Unicode Home Page: http://www.unicode.org/
Also useful: http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/fonts.html

Recommended for perusing and selecting the contents of Unicode fonts:
Unicode Font Viewer (freeware:
http://www.delphi-unicode.net/Tools.html).

***

LL-L "Software" 2002.11.02 (06) [E]

Unfortunately, there is no one complete Unicode font as yet.  The most
extensive one I know about is Arial Unicode.  It includes all sorts of Asian
language characters.  Unfortunately, it can no longer be downloaded from the
Microsoft site.  Please look on your MS software installation CDs if it came
with whatever MS programs you recently got, because apparently it is not
being installed automatically with the programs due to its size.  If you
look around for long enough you might find a website that still lets you
download it (e.g., http://www.101fonts.com/site/new.htm).  Warning: this
font file is much larger than the usual ones, because it contains thousands
of characters, including the more frequently used traditional and simplified
Chinese characters (!), plus Japanese-specific ones, various Indic scripts,
Thai, Khmer, etc., as well as mathematical symbols.  So, you might want to
decide against having it if you are not halfway serious about this matter.

Some of the "special" characters will be visible in some standard fonts
also, such as Times New Roman, Verdana and Courier New, which most of you
probably already have or can download from the Microsoft site for free.  (We
are using Verdana in our "Lowlands Talk" series
[http://www.lowlands-l.net/talk/], and the Cyrillic characters for Russian
and Ukrainian are no problem there.)  However, this would not include the
Asian scripts other than Hebrew and Arabic, besides Greek and Cyrillic.
Oftentimes you must change the view mode and the font choice of your web
browser or your email interface to see whatever characters happen to be
used.  Play around and see which ones display what sorts of text, and soon
you will know what to switch to under what circumstances.  If, for instance,
you know that someone gave the Hebrew script version of a Yiddish word
besides transliteration (which should be done for the sake of politeness),
you might not want to bother changing the view mode if you cannot read
Hebrew symbols or do not care to see them.

(Candon, you can switch in Yahoo Mail as well, because it is a web mail
account, and it is your *browser* [e.g., Netscape or MS Explorer] whose
encoding and font loading choice you must set (under "View").

To learn more about how to set your browser's  language display, look under
"View" and/or "Help."  Do the same with your email programs if they are not
web-based.

There are several sites that offer more information about Unicode, e.g.,
   http://www.unicode.org/
   http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/
   http://home.att.net/~jameskass/INDEXUNI.HTM

For those of you with PCs, here's a quick review of how to load a font.

o Download a font into whatever folder you choose.
o Go to "Start" > "Setting" > "Control Panel" > "Fonts", choose "Install a
New Font" and direct it to the folder in which you saved the font; the font
name will show; select it and allow it to be installed.*

* If you know your way around the Windows Explorer program, just go to the
  folder in which you saved the font, and drag the font into the "Fonts"
folder.
  (Do a search for "fonts" if you cannot find the folder easily.)  Of
course, you
  could just as well download the file *directly* into the fonts folder.

Please feel free to contact me privately about this, but be warned that I
may not have all the answers, so you might first want to try to find them on
the web or from knowledgeable associates.

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