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[Andrew Cunningham]

Hi Mia,

when you said "Apachean has special characters for the
high-tone/rising vowels which are not supported directly by Unicode."
I'd be interested knowing which Apachean characters are not supported.

I haven't played with flash much yet. Mainly working on web services,
web sites, most of my work is on internationalization architecture
relating to community languages. We prefer to build our sites so we
can throw any language at it. Although i want to do more work on good
classes and functions to handle language specific case-folding and
collation.

Unfortunately there is no real font embedding mechanism. CSS
introduced the @font-face command, and Netscape 4 and IE 4/5/5.5
played with it.

But the command was removed from CSS 2.1. We're currently waiting for
CSS 3.0 to provide a workable solution.

It is possible to embedded SVG fonts in SVG files, but the barrier
here is SVG plugins have limited support for the SVG font modules. SVG
could have been very good, but good browser support has been slow, and
many developers use flash instead.

Fonts are always a problem. The languages i work with may have only
one to five fonts available capable of correctly rendering text in
those languages. Added to that, we are limited by the capabilities of
the font rendering and text layout services for the operating systems.

The ability to use languages on computers has advanced greatly over
the years, yet there are still barriers and hurdles. probably one of
the reasons i use html and xml as a medium.

One of my side projects at the moment is writing documentation and
help files to assist African language clients on configuring their
computers to view African language content on the web. We're focusing
on languages that require combining diacritic support and diacritic
stacking.

Or languages that require alternative glyphs.

There are some really good, flexible fonts out there at the moment,
but the limitations are often at the OS or application level.

For one language (Moro) we require alternative glyphs for two
character pairs. The font Charis SIL has the alternative glyphs
available as an alternative (the opentype spec provides a mechanism
for accessing and using alternative glyphs) unfortunately most
applications do not provide a mechanism to access these features.
Indesign and WorldPad come to mind as possibilities.

WorldPad is very simple program, but useful in some circumstances. And
Indesign, although it supports alternative glyphs and ligatures very
well, doesn't handle diacritic positioning ... catch-22 as the
expression goes.

Getting fonts to installed on users computers either means the end
user has to down load and install fonts, or distributing keyboard
layouts or IMEs that have bundled fonts with them.

But then free keyboard layout solutions (Like MSKLC) are fairly
limited and unsophisticated, and not always suitable for our
requirements.

So often we provide a free solution (based on MSKLC) and a more
sophisticated alternative based on a commercial solution (Keyman
Desktop) which we can bundle other stuff.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Vicnet Research and Development Coordinator
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc at vicnet.net.au
lang.support at gmail.com