Hello!

I have not yet learned how to pronounce Irish from text, and
in my state of ignorance, I find it simply delightful,
"embedded history" and all. When "Mhaonaigh"* is pronounced
"Weenie", I know better than to try to say it! Another
delight is the Irish spelling for Turlough O'Carolan...
*fairly sure of the spelling; apologies if wrong.

(Btw, "Mhaonaigh" is the last name of the very fine lead
singer in the very good Irish trad. band, Altan. One of their
best-known songs (Dúlamán) contains lots of nonsense Irish!)

Fwiw, I have had quite a difficult time with receiving
messages from this group; for some reason, it seems to be
classified as spam by the ISPs that I have been using. In any
event, messages to me always bounced.

Whether Qalam ever received my greeting and short self-
commentary, I don't know; it would have been several weeks
ago. For now, call me a[n] Unicode hobbyist and dilettante
linguist. My interest in Unicode is more toward the writing
systems than the computer aspect, but only somewhat.

=====

A few notes on software: Opera 6.05 can compose e-mail
containing much of the Unicode BMP (the original 65K code
space) if you have an up-to date RichEdit.dll, and Arial
Unicode or some other gigantic font.

Sharmahd Computing's SC Unipad is a delightful MS Windows
9X/NT (2K?) Unicode editor. It's free for personal use, if
you can live with short files, 1,000 characters max.
Otherwise, it costs $100 US.

It has two very-extensive built-in fonts; it's BiDi to a
depth of 60 levels and maybe a few more, with RtoL text-entry
mode, too. If you wish, it will create joined/shaped Arabic.
It looks great for creating all sorts of different Unicode
file formats; most likely, it can convert among them, as
well.

I have no connection with SC; I simply like the program a
lot. <http://www.unipad.org/main/> Download size is probably
less than 3.5 megabytes, including fonts.

Linux users should know about Yudit, a remarkable
bidirectional editor, apparently created by one person.
Free, of course. <www.yudit.org>

Best regards,

Nicholas Bodley ||@|| Waltham, Mass.
Why use Opera? http://tntluoma.com/opera/lover/
Sent via TheWorld.com