>Heil öll,
>
>Keth has been running a reply-thread to my o-tail inquiry. Frankly, I
>don't seem to understand any of the technicalities that he's talking
>about, so I'm not an inch nearer to concluding whether the o-tail
>character that I have can be used in the lessons or not. Can anybody
>tell me if it presents all right on your screen, once you've
>downloaded the font I provided (the "Tymes" one)?
>
>Óskar

Heill Óskar!

The emails are made up of binary packages, that are interpreted
as series of pairs of hexadecimal numbers (2 hex digits = 1 byte)
on the CPU and register levels.

What I did was to check what bytes the file otail.doc contained.
My conclusion was that the byte you wish to use for o-tail
is the same byte that is normally used to code for the character
"q". Since the "q" is not used in Old Norse, it might be a good
choice. That presupposes that you have made up a new font that
has replaced the character "q" by an o-tail. (upper as well as
lower case)

The disadvantage is that if you want to write English text
interspersed with Old Norse, there won't be a "q" for the English.

The advantage is that a "q" looks a bit like o-tail,
and is thus easy to remember.


A while ago I wrote down some ON texts in electronic form.
I then used the "ç" (as in "français") to represent o-tail.
Perhaps a better choice?

There are however, in many ON texts (Skjalded.) also lengthened o-tails.
That gives an additional difficulty. I therefore changed back to
the simpler convention of writing
o-tail = "o,"
long o-tail = "ó,".
That seems to be the simplest to me right now.

With search-and-replace the files can presumably be changed later when
unicode or whatever becomes established as standard.


Regards
Keth