Re: Introduction - fonts

Jon,

>Jim
>
>A question on a related matter.
>
>> To the group: I will soon be posting the traditional
>> Pali alphabet of
>> 41 letters.
>
>What fonts are available for creating letters with
>diacritical marks?  And do they come in Macintosh
>versions also?

There are many fonts available on-line of which I only know a few. I
have also seen versions for the Macintosh. A problem with these fonts
is the lack of a universal standard in the character encoding for the
special 8-bit characters in the 128-255 dec range. A standard does
exist called csx or csx+ but many of the available fonts do not follow
this standard. I'm not all that familiar with font issues but I know
that a universal standard (unicode or UTF-8) exists for Roman Indic
characters that use many more bits such as 16-, 24-, or even higher
(not sure).

To download a csx+ font for the PC or Macintosh try the following
link:
http://www.dharmanet.org/~ratthapala/

For more information and links to other fonts try:
Fonts and Encodings for Pali:
http://www.fsnow.com/pali/fonts/

There is also a utilility for converting from one encoding to another.
The one I'm thinking of is the one where you can write Pali using the
email style: like pa~n~naa and then using the utility programm to
convert this into an encoding with the diacritics in the usual
position such as in a csx+ font. I don't have this program and
apparently it is temporarily unavailable online as the creator is
having problems with his webpage.

Two standards are acceptable for writing Pali in messages to this
group: the main one is the one I use on dsg and which is also used by
the Pali Text Society and Buddhist academics on Buddha-L eg. pa~n~naa.
The other one without the diacritics is acceptable within English
parts of messages such as what you and Sarah use on dsg. I would try
to avoid the style using the alt+xxx numeric keys for the characters
in the 128-255 range as I don't think they show up correctly on all
computers.

Best wishes,
Jim