Hm... I don't think that simply search-replacing of ascii characters for the characters the font uses them for will work, except on .txt files. Microsoft Word documents, HTML files, and any other non-plaintext files will almost certainly be corrupted by such a program, because the tags might contain those letters. (in addition, unlike .docx files, .doc files from windows xp contain binary data which could have arbitrary bytes.)
Probably in practical terms a good solution is to make a Microsoft Word macro to do the replacement, and post instruction to copypaste it. On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 3:34 AM, Martin J. Dürst <due...@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote: > 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. >