plea for help from Mac users

[Bryan James Gordon]

Dear Bruce,

I recently had the pleasure of reading some of your work on information
structure in Arabic. Thanks for that!

I use Mac pretty regularly. If I am not mistaken, your goal is to produce a
separate Lakota font such that, using a standard American keyboard layout,
people can get access to all the Lakota characters. I would suggest an
alternative, and much easier to code, route:

   1. Install a Unicode-compliant font that has all the characters from most
   American languages, like Aboriginal Serif/Sans, from languagegeek.org, or
   Gentium/Doulos and the other SIL fonts, or any other Unicode font with all
   the characters you need.
   2. Download the Lakota keyboard from
languagegeek.org<http://languagegeek.org/siouan/keyboards/si_kbds.html>
(click
   on "Mac Download for All languages") and follow the easy installation
   instructions for Mac.

This will give you several advantages over the old-fashioned approach of one
language, one font.

   1. Someone else has already done all the coding work. (They have three
   different Lakota keyboards to choose from!)
   2. Everyone who uses this system, will have Unicode-compliant (and
   therefore electronically archivable) copy instead of something that depends
   on a particular font.
   3. The Mac Siouan keyboard is easy to use, easy to switch back and forth
   to English keyboard (in Mac you can use Command-Space to switch keyboards
   usually), and is built into the desktop so that you can easily adjust your
   settings no matter what you're doing; and Mac also allows you to look at a
   picture of your keyboard on your screen if that helps. Very functional.

In the "All-in-One" keyboard the long ƞ is on your semicolon key, the
inverted comma and hacek on the left-bracket key. In the "Long ƞ" keyboard
the inverted comma is on the grave accent key, and only the hacek is on the
left-bracket key. The "White Hat" keyboard does not have haceks. Thus the
characters you ask specifically about, p' t' c' k' š ž č ǧ ȟ, are easily
produced using either of two already available Lakota keyboards.

Hope that helps!

- Bryan

2011/1/5 shokooh Ingham <shokoohbanou at yahoo.co.uk>

> Dear all,
> Do any of you use a mac?  I think I'm in the minority by using them.  I
> need to develop a font for writing Lakota.  It needs to have the possibility
> of an acute accent for vowel stress, a long n for the nasal vowels, an
> inverted comma to make p'-, t'- c'- and k'- and a hatchek to go over s-, z-,
> c-, g- and h-.  I don't mind how pedestrian it is and if I have to put the
> hatcheks on separately that's OK.  Macs used to be easy, but the more
> advanced they have become, the less things you can do in your own way.  I
> have of course got unicode, but it's difficult to make a font with it.
> Hope someone can help.
> Yours
> Bruce
>
>
>
>


-- 
***********************************************************
Bryan James Gordon, MA
Joint PhD Program in Linguistics and Anthropology
University of Arizona
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