African letters (Was: A basic question on encoding Latin characters)

From: John Hudson ([email protected])
Date: Sat Sep 25 1999 - 14:04:03 EDT


At 08:32 AM 25-09-99 -0700, Andrew Cunningham wrote:

>U+0254 LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN 0

>There is an uppercase version of this character ... U+0186 .. but from what
>I understand the Dinka character is subtly different

I would consider this to be a glyph variant. That is, you can legitimately
encode a Dinka form of the uppercase open O as U+0254.

>U+014B LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG

The uppercase encoding is

        U+014A LATIN CAPITAL LETTER ENG

Note that there is, again, a glyph variant question. The form of uppercase
Eng printed in the Unicode standard is the form preferred for the Saami
languages which use this character; the form used for African languages is
different but the encoding is the same.

>U+0263 LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA

The uppercase encoding is

        U+0194 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER GAMMA

>the six "breathy vowels" are represented by the vowel with dieresis
>
>The vowels in question are : a, e, I, o, U+0254, U+025B
>
>The vowel 'u' does not have a breathy form.
>
>All of which probably means that we'll have to resort to the undesirable
>solution of creating a custom character set and font ...

...unless you are working with a text processing system which has a way of
accessing unencoded glyphs -- e.g. glyph substitution routines or
on-the-fly diacritic composition. If you are working with Unicode savvy
apps, you can also encode the breathy vowels in the Private Use Area.

John Hudson

Tiro Typeworks
Vancouver, BC
www.tiro.com
[email protected]



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