[Lexicog] dictionary software

[Peter Kirk]

On 22/03/2004 11:55, Koontz John E wrote:

> On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Peter Kirk wrote:
> > If o with umlaut and acute is not already supported by Unicode as a
> > single code point, it never will be, because a decision has been made
> > not to support new precomposed characters, on the grounds that these are
> > unnecessary (and potentially extremely numerous!). But Unicode does
> > support this grapheme as a sequence of code points, o umlaut followed by
> > combining acute accent. Suitable software should be able to hide
> > entirely from the user that there is an underlying code point sequence.
>
> I've always thought this was a very elegant aspect of Unicode design, and
> was a bit disappointed when the project compromised to include various
> pre-composed forms, although this compromise was, of course, politically
> essential to get the European group in agreement.  But is such suitable
> software available for Windows screen display, Windows printing, not to
> mention Windows sorting?
>
For ideal Windows screen display and printing of this and other Latin
script composite characters, you need the version of Uniscribe (the
Windows rendering engine for Unicode) which is distributed with MS
Office 2003, and with a few other applications including Paratext 6
(available to Bible translators). You also need a suitable font; I think
Gentium or Doulos SIL do what you want, I'm not so sure about the
Microsoft core fonts.

For sorting, you simply need to define o umlaut followed by combining
grave as a digraph. This implies that you have some kind of special
sorting mechanism; but then the Windows default sorting is never going
to work for a language which uses such combinations.

--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/




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