--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Sam" <scopk@...> wrote:
>
> A couple of years ago I grew tired of the awkwardness of our notation
> on a computer keyboard
The problem we have is with the Yahoo groups web interface. It is
basically set up to handle Windows-1252 or ISO-8859 encodings.
If you are proposing to solve the problem by means of a hack font,
which as a Unicode man I strongly disapprove of, you need to map the
special characters to 0xA0 to 0xBF. It is not difficult to then
create a dead key-based keyboard map for PC owners to type the
characters in on Windows - and U*x is probably also straightforward.
(There are HTML plus javascript solutions for those who don't own the
PC they use.)
Any hack font solution will make the posts inaccessible to casual
readers - which I think is a bad idea.
> I know this will not please everyone because, for instance, it is not
> exhaustive, e.g. the laryngeals comprise only three. Nontheless
> please feel free to try it. I would like to hear from users whether
> it is useful, how it can be improved, and whether there is another
> extant font that is superior.
If you are thinking in terms of off-list creations, such as web pages
and PDF files, then the free Gentium font from the Summer Institute of
Languages (www.sil.org) provides all that your font does and is in
Unicode to boot, so your data will be readable even without your
special font. General purpose fonts such as Code2000 ($5 fee) also do
a similarly decent job.
If you want to type texts in IE langauges, there's FreeIdgSerif, which
aspires to cover their scripts. I've only used it for cuneiform - it
has a set of glyphs for Hittite. (Your work is probably more useful
if you work in transliteration - cuneiform is more decoration than
useful tool, and writing Sanskrit in Devanagari hinders rather than
helps.) It doesn't seem to cover PIE notation.
Richard.