ELL: Fonts

[Chuck Coker]

From: "Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine" <brunner at nic-naa.net>
Subject: Re: ELL: Q: Computer Localization for Minority Languages

> If your charset is covered somewhere in the iso8859-* series (e.g., barred
> "l" for Dineh (Navajo) available from Polish), then fonts aren't your main
> problem. If your charset isn't, e.g., syllabic forms for Cree, Inuktitut,
> etc., then fonts are a profound headache.

I can make custom fonts as I need them. I've made TrueType and PostScript
fonts for Windows in the past. I ~should~ be able to recompile them for use
on Macs, but I haven't tried it yet. The biggest problem is that with web
pages, for example, the user has to download the proper font, install it,
and ~then~ they can view the pages.

I haven't had much luck making fonts look as good on the monitor as fonts
from Monotype, Adobe, et al, although they are still readable. However, they
look very good when printed.

I'm in the beginning stages of creating a series of cross-referenced web
pages that describe fonts and the characters needed for different languages,
e.g., English can use all of the ISO 8859-* characters sets, Turkish 8859-9,
German 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, and 10, etc. I am working on pages organized by
character set (e.g., an ISO 8859-1 page) and pages organized by language
(e.g., a Hualapai page). I don't know enough about the letters, numbers,
punctuation, and so on for most languages to even know where to begin, so
progress is going slowly as I try to find speakers of different languages.

Some characters are not in ~any~ character set, including Unicode. For
example, Hualapai has a letter that looks like a Latin Capital Letter P
rotated 180 degrees with a Latin Capital Letter T combined so the vertical
lines are in the same place. There is a similar character in Unicode 3.0,
but it's not the same as the one the Hualapai people decided they were going
to use.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Coker <chuckc at tyrell.com>
Software Developer, Tyrell Software Corporation
23151 Verdugo Drive, Suite 204
Laguna Hills, California 92653 United States
+1 949 458 1911 ext. 3

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