People do not create machine-readible texts in the old orthography because of the technical challenges of reproducing them.
I have no difficulty reproducing machine-readable texts in the old orthography. I typeset a version of the Irish Constitution last year for Mícheál Ó Cearúil's book _Bunreacht na hÉireann: An téacs Gaeilge arna chaighdeánú_.
I've met many native speakers of Irish here in Chicago who want little to do with the written language because, as they say, it's not "their" language. If there were text processing resources available for the Gaelic script, this could change.
I also know people who do not like the spelling reform. This is a different thing from suggesting that the letter "i" in Gaelic type is a different letter from the letter "i" in Roman type. To suggest this is to ignore the character/glyph model, and it is to suggest the introduction of a practice which would *harm* the Irish language. And that is something that I, for my part, shall certainly not suppport.
> The letter "í" is the long form of "i". It is encoded0069 0301 (or its equivalent 00E9). It would also be a spelling error to encode "í" with 0131.
Those are the facts. It is not a matter for dispute.
I'm sorry. I do not acknowledge the ISO's authority to dictate "spelling" norms.
I did not say that these were ISO's facts. They are simply facts. Perhaps you have never typeset Irish, and changed the font.
Like all linguistic behavior, correct spelling is a matter of usage.
If you, or anyone else, thinks that the letter "i", drawn without a dot in a Gaelic typeface is really the Turkish "ž", then you are simply wrong. The Gaelic and Roman letterforms are glyph variants of the Latin script. Changing the font will lose the dot, if the Gaelic font has been drawn correctly and tastefully. This has been the case for the entire history of the use of the Irish langauge on computers. Those, Brian, are the facts.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
