Hello Don,
I agree with Doug that creating a good keyboard layout is a good thing
to do. Among the people on this list, you probably have the best
contacts, and can help create some test layouts and see how people react.
Also, creating fonts that have the necessary coverage but are encoded in
Unicode may help, depending on how well the necessary characters are
supported out of the box in the OS version in use on the ground (which
may be quite old).
Also, a conversion program will help. It shouldn't be too difficult,
because as far as I understand, it's essentially just a few characters
than need conversion, and it's 1 byte to multibyte. Even in a low level
language such as C, that's just a few lines, and any of the students in
my programming course could write that (they just wrote something
similar as an exercise last week).
On 2016/05/01 02:27, Don Osborn wrote:
Last October I posted about persistence of old modified/hacked 8-bit
fonts, with an example from Mali. This is a quick follow up, with
belated thanks to those who responded to that post on and off list, and
a set of examples from China and Nigeria. I conclude below with some
thoughts about what this says about dissemination of information about
Unicode.
I'm not familiar with the actual situation on the ground, which may vary
in each place, but in general, what will convince people is not
theoretical information, but practical tools and examples about what
works better with Unicode (e.g.: if you do it this way, it will show
correctly in the Web browser on your new smart phone, or if you do it
this way, even your relative in Europe can read it without installing a
special font,...).
Even in the developed world, where most people these days are using
Unicode, most don't know what it is, and that's just fine, because it
just works.
Regards, Martin.
