[RNLD] Resurrecting an opensource keyboard

[Andrew Cunningham]

Hi all,

Way back in the past while I was at the State Library of Victoria I worked
with some colleagues from Northern Territory Libraries to develop some
opensource tools for the indigenous languages of the Northern Territory.

When the State Library Victoria closed down its language technology
projects, most of the resources vanished from the Web. I have been slowly
resurrecting some of the work that was released under an opensource
license. At the moment I am looking at the work I did with NTL.

I have started resurrecting the cross platform keyboard layouts and some of
the web typography associated with some of the resources integrating it
back into a multilingual web typography module.

I am reaching out to the list for three purposes:

1) The current keyboard supports the following extended Latin characters:
Áá Ää Ḏḏ Éé Íí Ḻḻ Ŋŋ Ññ Ṉṉ Óó Ṟṟ Ṯṯ Úú ʼ. Are there others that should be
added. My language/alphabet data is fairly old and focused on NT languages
that NTL were interested in at the time. But I would be interested in
expanding it if there are characters that should be added to complete
language coverage.

2) With more modern operating systems and software, it is necessary to tie
input support into the correct input locale and input profile. IN practical
terms this means identifying which languages use the characters above, and
which BCP 47 language codes apply to those languages, to enable proper
integration into the input frameworks of modern operating systems. I know
some of the languages involved, but my data is likely to partial.

3) I am interested in any information about glyph variation used
historically in any of the languages. As a practical example the
character/letter Ŋ (CAPITAL ENG) is used in the Yolngu languages. Ŋ
shape/glyph will change depending on the font used. There are four attested
glyph variants for Ŋ: the N-form used in Northern European contexts, the
n-form and n-short-leg-form used by African languages and the turned-G
form. Yolngu languages use the N-form, but some older printed documents use
the Turned-G form of the letter. I was wondering if variant glyphs have
been observed for other letters?

Any assistance or pointers would be greatly welcomed.

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Cunningham
lang.support at gmail.com
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