forum

[Mia Kalish]

You know what? (Of course you don’t that was So Rhetorical). . . but here’s
what: 

If you own the font, you can modify it. So if you have a pile of fonts for
the University, you can change them yourself . . . or have a friend to it
for you (You have such a friend). That way, you can have the special
character in a pile of fonts. 

 

I imagine there is a way around this for others, because the Intellectual
Property rules restrict distribution of fonts to people who don’t own them.
It doesn’t say that if you own the font, you and your friends can’t modify
it. The rule is that you can modify it for your own use. 

 

I haven’t played with the scripting in Unicode, because the characters are
all individually coded with their unique numbers. Three character
compositions have 3 sequential 4-byte codes (I think), and possibly a
compositing instruction code. That means that if you are manually coding
Unicode, the sequence in which you specify the characters matters, with the
obvious results if people choose sequences randomly, thinking that the
appearance of the character is what is important. 

 

You description sounds like the fonts were manually coded. Characters sort
by their internal number; when you specified your preferred sort sequence,
whoever was helping recoded the glyphs so they would sort in the specified
order. Locales, lucky people <:-)> People don’t notice localization because
they don’t have to live without it. 

 

I don’t have Vista, although the changes sound intriguing. As for
OneSpellCheck fits OldAndNew . . . the internal codes are different. The
simplest approach is to have a utility that converts one to the other . . .
this means that the utility has to tiptoe through Word codes, changing only
the appropriate font codes. This is not overly difficult for a programmer,
but is definitely non-trivial for many. Our problem in Athapascan with “old
fonts” is that people replaced the Number sequence with the special vowels
and characters. Can you see what an amazing nightmare that is for sorting,
searching, databases? Aaaargh. But then, it was all people seemed to know
how to do. 

 

I took particular delight in “stepping on” characters that were not used in
either English or Athapascan to create my fonts. It horrified the Unicode
people, which, considering their complete non-responsiveness to Apachean
issues, made my little techie heart day. (I’m so bad.) 

 

I’m interested in your issues with your ancient program . . .  

 

And thanks, I’m sure this discussion is or will be useful for lots of
people. 

 

Going out into the Tsaile AZ mountain snow, now coming down in huge clots. 

 

Best always, 

Mia 

 

 

 

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Keola Donaghy
Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2008 8:47 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] forum

 

Aloha Mia. I don't know if the language scripts in Unicode have anything to
do with sorting routines. When we worked with Apple to get the Hawaiian
keyboard into OS X back in 1991 or 1992, we provided them with our preferred
sort order (vowels, Hawaiian consonants with the glottal last among those,
then the borrowed consonants). We also had to define the vowel-macrons as a
secondary sort, so that if there were (and there are) words that differ only
based on the presence of a macron over a vowel, the word with non-macron is
first, then the macron vowel. 

 

It took us several years of lobbying and it was only a chance meeting of a
friend of mine who works at Apple's headquarters with some Apple system
engineers that led to us getting Hawaiian support in OS X. They have since
added may more languages. So we have the Hawaiian keyboard, a Hawaiian
locale (which enables us to create localizations of OS X applications and
have them automatically displayed if there is a localization available), as
well as the custom sort routines and localized date and time strings.

 

When we created our HI fonts in the early 1990s, spell-checkers were also an
issue. That is why we replaced the y-umlaut character ( ÿ ) with the glottal
(‘) and replaced the vowel - umlaut combinations with the vowel macrons. In
the case of the ÿ, it also had the advantage of allowing us to sort properly
(in most cases). Back then ClarisWorks and Word did not accept punctuation
marks and other symbols within words, so we had to find a way to make it
work, and settled on ÿ. 

 

Office for Vista now handles custom spell-check documents with in Unicode
fine. Office for XP and Office for Mac 2004 did not, which was an issue. I
have not yet received a copy of Office 2008 for Mac so don't know if it can
use spell-check documents formated in Unicode yet. We are working on such a
document right now. At some point I'll have a single document that can
spell-check both documents typed in our old HI font system as well as
Unicode. I'll be a happy man on that day. ;-)

 

I'll look into the other Unicode glottal characters, perhaps someone here is
more familiar with them than I. To be honest, I somewhat regret our decision
to use the non-breaking character because it is available in so few fonts,
however, that it was the one I was encouraged to use by people who knew
better than I. 

 

We're in a very strange transitional place right now in our adaptation of
Unicode. Because of one particular application that we depend heavily upon,
we have not been able to completely abandon our old custom fonts and go to
Unicode. I'm hoping to have that issue taken care of by this summer.

 

I'll get back to you on the other glottal character(s).

 

Hope this help! Feel free to email if I can be of any other assistance.

 

Keola

 

On 15 Pep. 2008, at 4:26 PM, Mia Kalish wrote:





Yes, this is exactly what I mean. I’m not familiar with U+02BB. Hyphenation
is not an issue in Athapascan; I don’t think I have ever seen anything
hyphenated. But, the glottal has to sort first, before the vowels it
affects, ‘a is a typical form and is actually the most common glottalization
of leading vowels, although other vowels are glottalized in the same way.

 

Also, since we don’t have Athapascan language and grammar, we have to use
English, so we have to fool English into thinking the characters we are
typing actually belong to it so we can use spell-check.

 

How do you do this in Hawaiian? I just looked at my language options for
Word, and Hawaiian is a recognized language, We don’t have this luxury, and
although there is now a language code for NAV and APA, there are differences
in the 6 Apaches, and only one language code. Sigh. People are so stingy,
aren’t they?

 

 

 

 

========================================================================

Keola Donaghy                                           

Assistant Professor of Hawaiian Studies 

Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikolani             keola at leoki.uhh.hawaii.edu 

University of Hawai'i at Hilo           http://www2.hawaii.edu/~donaghy/

 

"Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam."  (Irish Gaelic saying)

A country without its language is a country without its soul.

========================================================================

 





 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20080214/236743fa/attachment.htm>