build a font for your endangered language...

[Rudy Troike]

Bill,

   Just as an observation, a lot of people paste Word documents (memos,
announcements, etc.) into our university Webmail (which I'm using now), and
even something as simple as double quotes (") show up on the screen as
question marks (?). (I always preferred WordPerfect 5.1, but gave it up for
WP 11, and even had to abandon that because people couldn't read my
attachments, as they wouldn't convert to Word for some reason). So I am
wondering how well special characters, even ones chosen from the Word
character options, would transmit on an institutional Webmail application
(I haven't tried this, and should, just to find out).

   [As a different matter, our Webmail allows for different languages, but
for English uses Charset Western ISO-8859-1, with -15 as an option, but I
don't know whether different character sets can be mixed in the same
document such as the one I'm composing now. I've tried, and haven't been
able to figure out how to put accents on vowels, though I've seen them come
through in Linguist List annoucements. Maybe Phil Cash Cash has the answer
to this, since he is using the same Webmail.]

   A second problem comes in printing. I can compose a document, such as
a class handout, using the special Word characters, but my fairly up to date
HP LaserJet 4050 leaves blanks (or less often prints other characters) where
the desired character appears fine onscreen. So I have to wind up going back
and writing these in by hand. It's messy and maddening. I can send the Word
documents to others as attachments, but I would guess that many of them
would have the same problem with not seeing the characters printed out, so
they wouldn't be able to understand what I was writing about.

   I did once try downloading some of the SIL fonts in order to be able to
use phonetic symbols, but I could never get them to show up onscreen within
a Word document, or if I did (it's been several years now), they would not
print on my old HP printer (using Windows 98).

   Any suggestions on these problems would be appreciated.

   Rudy