Peter Constable wrote:
Andrew C.>
> >This problem isn't unique to Dinka, you'll find it exists in other african
> and
> >some australian aboriginal languages. So teh question is ... how should
> one
> >handle kllangauges that use combinations of latin letters and diacritics
> and
> >where a precomposed form does not exist?
Peter C.>
> There are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages with this
> issue. There's at least one language in Peru that has to stack diacritics
> three high!
>
> How do you handle these? You wait till the rendering technology catches up,
> or you build your own (e.g. Graphite) and build apps that work on that. I
> suspect (or, at least, certainly hope) we'll see progress in this regard in
> IE 6.
>
Waiting isn't much of an option, the users need results now.
How many years has it been since the combining diacritic
range was established and how many applications currently
adequately support it?
John Hudson writes that Uniscribe will soon allow generic
shaping and substitutions with OpenType.
Even when the rendering technology catches up, the old 386's
and such that are in use in places like the Sudan may not be able
to support an OS capable of using new rendering technology.
>From About.com's page on Sudan:
http://afroamculture.about.com/culture/afroamculture/library/africa/blsudan.htm
"... Sudan is buffeted by civil war, chronic political instability, adverse weather,
weak world commodity prices, a drop in
remittances from abroad, and counterproductive economic policies. ..."
"... Sluggish economic performance over the past decade, attributable largely to
declining annual rainfall, has kept per capita income at low levels. A large foreign
debt and huge arrears continue to cause
difficulties. ..."
The About.com page also mentions that unemployment is at 30% and
the per capita purchasing power parity is $940.
It isn't surprising that Sudan's linguistic communities weren't
devising official code pages during the 1980's, which would have
allowed the characters required for their orthographies to be
covered by Unicode. In addition to the poverty factor, export of
computer technology from countries like the U.S.A. was banned by
law to many regions during the 1980s.
Similar circumstances may apply to many of the hundreds or
thousands of 'Unicode-challenged' writing systems mentioned
by Peter Constable.
Peoples in depressed areas would probably benefit greatly from
being able to compute in their own languages.
Building applications to provide special support while waiting for
the technology to advance, as Peter mentions, would be one way
to overcome these display problems.
Why re-invent the wheel? Andrew Cunningham mentioned the
Private Use Area of Unicode as one alternative. Existing hardware
and software already provide some support for PUA characters.
As far as exchanging data consistently, perhaps some kind of PUA
registry for precomposed Latin characters not included in Unicode
could be established along the same lines as the ConScript Unicode
Registry.
Andrew also mentioned custom (8-bit) code pages, which are widely
used. Lately, people who haven't considered the lack of alternatives
have taken to criticizing such practicality, calling it "font-hacks" and
so forth. If you do make custom code page web sites, perhaps you
should consider maintaining duplicate web pages in Unicode. Even
though the Unicode pages wouldn't display, they would be handy to
send as links in response to anyone complaining about non-standard
code pages.
Custom code pages may have an advantage over PUA. On older
systems, it is possible to change the DOS or system font. A custom
system font would mean that users could work with tools such as
plain text editors, older database software, &c.
Whether the PUA or custom code pages are used, some kind of
software which converts to and from Unicode would be
helpful to assure that users of older hardware can continue
to communicate with the "modern" world.
If the ancient Egyptians had waited for international approval and
support for their writing system, they'd have left no written
record of their existence.
Best regards,
James Kass.
