Re: Complex Fonts for Windows NT Series

--- suzmccarth <suzmccarth@...> wrote:

>
> > Uniscribe and Pango, once they are complete*, must
> > represent a great deal of work.
> > *I'm just about sure that neither is.
> >
> > Suzanne McC. might like to have a look at the
> > Tamil specimen on the Pango page.
>
> Hi, I looked at it but it doesn't look like a
> Unicode font to me.

You tell from looking at a fond what encoding it uses?

> The Latha font is quite attractive and clear and
> views very well in IE. I can view any Tamil site I
> wish now.
>
> Unicode Tamil looks great. In fact, just today at
> school my multilingual working group, seven 9 year
> olds who among them have 5 different languages but
> also are competent in English, (we meet once a week
> in class and sometimes after school) presented PPT
> dictionaries (text converted to image along with a
> picture)in Tamil, Chinese and Russian. The kids were
> very eager to read each others script.
>
> The problem is that keyboading with Uniscribe is
> quite difficult.

Uniscribe is only for display, it's quite separate
from
the input system. Word, however, seems to dip its
fingers into everything and has effects on input and
rendering. Notepad is quite innocent of such
interfering though.

> One problem is that if there is a time delay between
> typing the C and the V then they do not reshape and
> connect. So you have to start again.

How bizarre. What software are you using?

> Also any spelling error at all will mess everything
> up and detach the preceding syllable so you have to
> retype it.

That sounds like the type of thing I remember Word
doing. Trying to be smart but getting in the way.

> I have a student this year who is literate in Tamil
> and English. He can sort of keyboard in tamil but
> with much support from me. However, he still
> protests, they all do, - these kids find Uniscribe
> and the whole process of producing the syllable
> shapes by typing in letters to be quite absurd.

Do they find both Uniscribe and the input absurd, or
are they confused as to what is what? I suppose they
find the whole package absurd without thinking about
what parts of that are Uniscribe.

> The reshaping and rendering is so nonintuitive.
> However, the end result looks great.

It's already got better since MS's first attempts. I'm
sure it'll get better in the future. Nobody's ever
tried to do this stuff with Indian scripts before and
there's surely not much financial incentive.

> Here is a site about Unicode Khmer.
>
>

http://www.bauhahnm.clara.net/Khmer/Welcome.html#ODDENCODING

>
>
> I only use Notepad for Unicode fonts since I don't
> have an office edition with a dll file.

Which dll file? A dll is a
"dynamically liked libarary". Windows contains loads
of them, other software comes with loads more. Office
has quite a few of them. Which one are you missing?

> You can google things like 'unicode versions'
> or 'dll files' etc. I did and found a page which
> helped me identify what was what. (sorry I lost it)
>
> Read this post for insight into how others are
> dealing with Uniscribe.
>
>

http://lists.webarch.co.uk/pipermail/multikulti-tech/2004-

> May/000085.html
>
> When all else fails ask Andrew Cunningham in
> Australia.
> andrewc at vicnet.net.au
>
> I think the Pango stuff is kept up to date (2003 for
> sure) but I hear that IE displays Unicode Tamil
> better than mozilla so I still use Windows.

Last I heard, Mozilla didn't use Unicode. They had
developed their own rendering system from scratch.
The PanGo people and other Gnome and Linux people were
trying to get them to switch but they had a lot
invested and already had solved some problems that
Pango hadn't got to at that point. All this could've
changed since I stopped paying attention of course.

Andrew Dunbar.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Suzanne
>
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > --
> > Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
> > The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath
> > Libranet GNU/Linux: No bit rot!
> > Our recent election: Smallest margin since
> > Woodrow Wilson, 1916: Not a mandate.
>
>
>
>

=====
http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl http://www.abisource.com



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