Richard Wordingham wrote:

> Does anyone here know where I can find some machine-readable texts in
> the Yi syllabary? If there's a choice of forms, HTML would be
> preferable to PDF.

Try this, especially the yet incomplete "600 Phrases in the Liangshan Yi
Dialect":

http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Yi

> I'm interested in the frequency and co-occurrence of syllables and how
> much alien text there is, e.g. Chinese ideographs or Western
> punctuation. I'm afraid the reason isn't particularly linguistic - I
> am wondering how well simple Unicode compression algorithms could be
> made to work on it.

I don't think Chinese "ideographs" are ever interspersed within Yi text.
However you will notice quite a lot of (unrecognizable) Putonghua loanwords
transcribed in Yi script. As for punctuation, I think that in modern usage
it is exactly the same as in Chinese.

--
Marco