FW: Unicode

[Johanna Laakso]

Forwarded, a relevant message from Trond Trosterud.
--
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso
Institut für Finno-Ugristik der Universität Wien
Universitätscampus, Spitalg. 2-4 Hof 7, A-1090 Wien
Tel. +43 1 4277 43009 | Fax +43 1 4277 9430
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at | http://mailbox.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/

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Von: Trond Trosterud <trond.trosterud at hum.uit.no>
Datum: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 10:27:19 +0200
An: "Johanna Laakso" <johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at>
Betreff: Re: Unicode


>Daniel Abondolo wrote:
>
>>At this end (with Unicode UTF-8) encoding on a fairly early version of IE5,
>>all seem to be coming through fine EXCEPT the letters for Mari front
>rounded
>>vowels.

I see that we are linguists, which is good :-)

But the generalisation is rather on Unicode code page blocks. It seems that
Cyrillic letters outside the Russian A-JA range are rendered as question
marks, at least on my mac os9.1 NS4.7. So, Johanna, although a mac user, I
can read the Russian, the Japanese (and for that matter the Sámi of
http://www.samediggi.no), but I cannot read letters from the socalled
"Extended Cyrillic" unicode block, i.e. from U+048C onwards (
http://www.unicode.org/charts/ for the ones that haven't seen them). This
is just a font issue, with a font with a broader coverage, I would have
been able to do so. The to-do on me and other mac users is thus to urge the
Apple Language Kit providers to include more cyrillic letters in their
fonts (I cannot see Apple's glyph repertoire, but their lg kit only
provides Bulgarian, Ukrainian and Russian keyboards).

The basic issue is thus whether it accepts UTF-8 or unicode settings out
over the 8-bit straightjacket at all, thereafter it is a font issue, or
rather a glyph issue (i.e. picture of letter or ideograph). It might be
that the only update that need to be done is to get a bigger font, than
even to change settings (although the browser probably uses the biggest
font available by default).

Trond.

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