ELL: Fonts

[Andrew Cunningham]

Hi Eric,

thanks for the info, and the projects you describe sound fascinating.

Quoting Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner at nic-naa.net>:

>
> Incidently, I personally think that characters have properties other
> than
> their glyph, e.g., sort order. I do OS work, the UniCadettes do
> printers.
>

true

>
> As I mentioned above, characters have properties other than appearance.
> For
> Central African Syllabics (Dr. Nii Quanor's project, and incidently host
> in
> Ghana of next Spring's ICANN meeting), the offered encoding is likely to
> be
> in two distinct code pages -- one in the Latin pages, for characters
> with
> glyphs similar to or borrowed from a European language, and one
> elsewhere,
> for characters with unique glyphs. This has non-trivial consequences to
> the
> authors of collation (sort) algorithms for CAS, as for the authors of
> ASCII
> Compatible Extension (ACE) algorithms (one fundamental technique) for
> DNS
> labels containing names in CAS characters.
>

very very interesting.

my main area of work is with public libaraies and ethnic/migrant community
organisations in providing greater access to non-english langauge material via
teh internet, and also the provision of basic word processing and office
applications.

and through this work, I've also become involved in a couple of projects
relating to language maintenance among immigrants from Africa. In once case this
also involves the development of fonts and keyboard layouts for some languages,
in order to develop text books to use teaching their children their native
languages.

Far far down the track will it be before some of Dr Nii Quanor's work on Central
African Syllabics starts to appear? My primary interest at the moment is
sub-saharan langauges. But i'm interested in the implications of his possible
work with african languages using latin derived scripts.

We're also interested in the use od chat and instant messaging technologies for
communication in native languages across a diaspora.

>
> The relations between the UTC, SC2, SC22, and national standards bodies
> over
> the past decade is more complex than simply propriatary advantaging
> policy
> by a vendor.
>

true. Any following the development of unicode and the process for including new
characters that juggling act is apparent.

but i tend to think more from an end users perspective at times, when i'm
training librarians and settlemens officers, UTC, SC2, SC22 doesn't mean a thing
to them, and thier eyes would glaze over. To them, their connection/experience
of unicode boils down to what they can or cann't do in their operating system or
office applications or web browser.

So our manuals are designe for the novice. In the guides under development for
teh trainers, I'll go into more technical details. But such detail isn't
appropriate for the training manuals.


>
> At last, a tail fin that has legs.
>

lol

Andrew Cunningham
Multilingual Technical Project Officer
Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet
State Library of Victoria,
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
----
Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
----