On 07/26/2002 10:46:16 PM "Addison Phillips [wM]" wrote:
>I dunno, Curtis. This sounds less like a job for Unicode and more like a job >for other mechanisms, such as user-defined locales... >Granted that keyboarding is a pain if you choose a character collection that is >not represented by a convenient keyboard. But the real issues appear to be >mostly in linguistically related processing (like word breaking, sentence >breaking, collation, and the like). In most cases these are not something that >Unicode per-se can help with, but which user-defined locale data could.... If it takes some software developer creating a custom locale and then hoping that other developers will support that locale in their software, then that seems like a lot of obstacles, and is exactly why I'd say that the Luiseño or any other small language community (such as our linguists within SIL are working with regularly) need input from technically-minded people when they devise their orthographies -- just as the linguists would say that they really would benefit from having someone with linguistic training involved in the development of their orthography. (Unfortunately, I still have to get the message across to our linguists that they need input from the technical people as well.) It's very easy to implement fonts and input methods that handle unusual characters. It's very difficult to get applications to recognise something like "@" as a word-forming, alphabetic character. If apps happen to apply the line-breaking, etc. behaviour that would be desired, you're in luck, but if not, then you're not likely going to find it easy to get the IBMs and Microsofts of the world to revise their software to support your unusual behaviour. If one needs an extra character, Unicode has lots to choose from, and tools like Fontographer and Tavultesoft Keyman are not hard to work with (if you can find adequate fonts and only need a keyboard, this is a pretty trivial problem to solve). If I were Curtis, I would be inclined to actively advise my Tongva contacts that their choices have implications if they desire to see their writing system supported in commercial software, and that they might want to consider some of the tradeoffs to the various alternatives facing them. >That does leave you with the must less happy problem of finding a platform with >user defined locales (approximately no platforms conveniently do this). Indeed, a big problem, which is why I would avoid it as much as possible. - 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]>
