Michael Everson wrote:

>
> At 08:00 -0400 2005-08-10, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> >Perhaps ignorance of this basic fact is what led computer engineers to
> >think that roman-based input is appropriate for other syllabaries, where
> >there _was_ no tradition of roman spelling.
>
> Even so, some communities are so small that there is no opportunity
>
> >Why would anyone _want_ to write Vai with a computer?
>
> Wow. That's a pretty condescending view.

Are Muslims "condescending" because a Qur'an that's not written out by
hand isn't a legitimate copy of the Qur'an?

There was no Arabic typesetting in the Muslim world until the late 19th
century -- and only then, in Bulaq, when fonts with hundreds of variants
and ligatures were cut so as to all but undetectably imitate
handwriting.

> >If there's any accuracy at all in Scribner & Cole, the Vai script is
> >used in a very limited set of contexts where computerization
> >wouldn't be appropriate anyway.
>
> Nonsense. Yes, nonsense. At a minimum one could use it to prepare
> primers for publication rather than writing them by hand.
>
> In point of fact, we have worked to encode Vai because Vai people
> wanted us to because they want to use Vai on computers.
>
> >(When the Vai syllabary proved too big for one font, we simply scanned
> >script specimens and dropped them into the WWS text.)
> >
> >((And, computer engineers, don't start that bullshit about fonts
> >accommodating thousands of characters -- in 1993 they couldn't.
> >Period.))
>
> To produce the Vai encoding proposal, I used a number of 8-bit fonts.
> And one could do that in 1993 too. (In 1993 there were no Vai fonts,
> though.)

using more than one font for one script was utterly impractical. We
tried it momentarily for one of the extended Arabics (Sindhi, probably),
but quickly went to composite characters instead.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...