On 03/09/2002 11:20:43 AM "Vladimir Ivanov" wrote: >If I build an Avestan font according to Michael Everson's specifications >(Avestan characters should be in BMP, see >http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/avestan.pdf)
How do you propose to encode the characters? That documentation does not specify that, nor could it since actual codepoints are not chosen by authors of proposals but by the standards bodies. Did you have in mind private-use characters? > and a Keyman >keyboard layout, would I be able to type Avestan texts in: >Word 2002, Publisher 2002, Access 2002 under Windows 2000/XP? Assuming some answer to the previous question, yes, you can *type* them. You'll be lucky to get any more support for them than that. >Is it necessary to add some special characters to Keyman keyboard to tell >Uniscribe that Avestan is a >right-to-left script? I suppose you could insert U+202E at the beginning of a run and U+202C at the end. Whether it does what you want could only be determined by experimentation. >Or should this be done through the VOLT (Avestan font >needs some right-to-left kerning)? Generally, how can an application know >that a certain range of BMP belongs to a right-to-left script? It has to rely somehow on Unicode character properties. In theory, these could be obtained from a variety of sources, including a font (Graphite does provide the ability to specify directionality of private-use characters, for example), but in practice most software implementations of the bidi algorithm don't work that way. Some may have particular ranges hard-wired into code; others may lookup in compiled tables. >Should we wait for Keyman 6 to type Old Persian in the same applications >because this script is in Plane 1? Before typing *anything* using Plane 1 codepoints, you should wait until it has been incorporated in The Unicode Standard and ISO 10646. If you jump the gun and implement something that has been proposed but not yet standardised, you create a very real risk of ending up with invalidly-encoded data since the codepoints can and often do change between a proposal and the approved standard -- even the actual inventory of characters often undergoes change. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
