Cyrillic Fonts in OS X

[Don Livingston]

Francoise Rosset wrote:

>A transliterated/phonetic/homophonic font that works in
Word (most of
us seem to be working with Word), in both PCs and Macs, has
accenting
and other diacritic options, AND remains functional or at
least
replaceable through all permutations of the operating
systems -- it
just doesn't seem that unreasonable a wish.<

As a wish it is not unreasonable, but to provide it is no
small task.  When dealing with alphabets on a computer,
there are several significantly different issues:

1.  All computer systems represent characters as numbers.
2.  The correspondence between an abstract letter and the
number assigned to it is not necessarily consistent from one
system to another.
3.  The correspondence between an abstract letter and the
number assigned to it may in fact vary on the same computer
system.  For instance, my computer may be localized to
represent Russian "A" as 225 (KOI8 coded character set) or
as 128 (866 coded character set).  On my own home computer I
actually switch between four different encodings for
Russian.
4.  The coded character set used to store the file may be
different than the coded character set used to display on a
text-only monitor.
5.  The coded character set used to store the file may be
different than the coded character set represented in the
font used to display on a graphical user interface.
6.  The coded character sets used to store and display
information may be different than the coded character set of
the printer font.
7.   The computer must be directed to know what character
code is actually meant when the a particular key on a
keyboard is pushed.

The Mac world tried to simplify things by talking about
installing "homophonic fonts" or "transliterated fonts", and
by doing so its users gained the impression that issues 4,
5, 6, and 7 are single issue, which they definitely are not.
The reason it worked as well as it did in the past is
because the Mac folks had decided how to resolve each of
those issues and labelled those group resolutions with
phrases like "homophonic keyboard."  Only fairly
sophisticated users ever learned that that "homophonic
keyboard" actually a particular keyboard to character
mapping with a particular character to screen mapping with a
particular character to printer mapping.  These are
non-trivial issues to resolve.  A file saved in coded
character set 866 must be deliberately transformed to coded
character set KOI8-R if the recipient requires that
localization.

We are in fact finally approaching some resolution to the
problems in that Unicode and (and its UTF-8 encoding) are
approaching ubiquity.  Anyone who wishes to be competent
over the next ten years in exchanging multilingual files
really needs to learn the following skills:

- how to read/write files in Unicode
- how to convert files from whatever local character set
they have into UTF-8 text
- how to set their e-mail and web authoring resources to
Unicode & UTF-8.

Unicode already spans the PC/Mac/Unix divide.  All the
resources are currently available.  Anyone failing to learn
those skills will most likely continue to experience the
frustrations of not being able to exchange documents or read
documents.  Actually, one of these days even the SEELANGS
list should probably be set to transform all e-mails into
UTF-8.  That way those of us who receive digest will no
longer have the mishmash of KOI8, 866, and UCS2 characters
that so illegibly arrive on occasion.

One plug:  current major distributions of the GNU/Linux
operating system come with all the tools needed to deal with
all the major character set issues.  (That's true for the
European languages at least.  I'm ignorant of the Asian
language resources.)  I'm running Mandrake 9.2 at home and
can pretty well read/write all the encodings in text and
html formats without minimal effort, both at the console and
under the GUI.  There is non-trivial learning at first, but
it's worth it to finally have most of one's data ducks in a
row.

All the best, Don Livingston.

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