Unicode & font creation

[David D. Robertson]

[Alan's note was published in the bulletin mentioned below.  This will be
of interest to a number of list members. -- Dave]


SSILA Bulletin
Number 178: October 1, 2002



* Fonts, fonts, fonts...and Unicode
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>From Alan H. Hartley (ahartley at d.umn.edu) 26 Sep 2002:

I'm a bit hesitant to broach this, as I'm by no means an expert in the
field, but I'm impelled to by the number of discussions I've read
recently (on the Siouan and Chinook listservs, SSILA, et al.) concerning
fonts for native languages: "where can I get a font for my particular
orthography of language X?", "why won't font Y display special character
such-and-such?", etc. There must be hundreds (thousands?) of such fonts
available--free or for sale--and they create a lot of duplication and
confusion, the latter usually because the potential user lacks the
font(s) with which the file was created. I suggest that people with a
serious interest in language (and who have the software needed, like the
newer browsers and word-processors) learn about Unicode as a
standardized way to represent most of the world's languages. Full
Unicode fonts are very large, but most modern hard-drives have enough
space. A good starting point is the Unicode home-page at:

http://www.unicode.org/

For those with Unicode-capable browsers, check out the various
translations of the "What is Unicode?" page at:

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html

Netscape 7, for instance, does a good job (quickly) of rendering the
various scripts, using the Arial Unicode MS font. (I'm using Windows 98.)

--Alan Hartley
Duluth, Minnesota
(ahartley at d.umn.edu)