From: Marion Gunn (mgunn@egt.ie)
Date: Fri Mar 19 2004 - 14:46:50 EST
Ar 15:41 +0000 2004/03/18, scríobh jameskass@att.net:
>Anyone who feels that past monetary contributions towards encoding
>efforts were made based on false pretenses may be able to seek legal
>redress...
>James Kass
An admission of having made a seemingly foolhardy investment hardly amounts
to making such a claim as you say, James.:-)
Scríobh Doug:
>I sincerely hope that if you have the experience and expertise in
>Unicode that you claim, you can come away with somewhat better
>understanding of the principles of Unicode than you are demonstrating
>here.
Nu-huh. I claim only to have had such understanding and enthusiasm as
inspired me to work very hard, for many years, to finance something of a
curate's egg.
Would you ask all Unicode backers to first demonstrate an understanding of
its principles equal to yours before letting them foot the price of your
travel costs?:-)
>Unicode is NOT a glyph registry...
As far as 'Irish long s' was concerned, it was, surely.:-)
Scríobh <brian@gael-image.com>
>People do not create machine-readible texts in the old orthography because of
>the technical challenges of reproducing them. 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 have to agree with the above paragraph of Brian's.
More from Brian:
>Therefore, it's not a question of what font the document creator chooses; it's
>a
>matter of what system is chosen. I would slightly modify Marion's question to
>this:
>
>In the context of a document using traditional Irish orthography (which does
>not
>contain "i"), how can "dotless i" be preserved in plain text?
Modification accepted, with thanks.
Scríobh Peter Kirk <peter@qaya.org>:
>May I pick a nit here? Dotless i is used in the official orthography of
>at least one non-Turkic language, that of Udi, a north-east Caucasian
>minority language of Azerbaijan; I think it is also in the Latin script
>orthography of Lezgi, the language of a much larger minority group.
That is good news, if it equates to good news for Irish. Do you think it
does, Peter? Too many more msgs to wade through, which ain't necessarily
true.:-)
Scríobh Carl W. Brown" <cbrown@xnetinc.com>:
>...
>I think that I like Peter Constable's suggestion:
>
>> Keep in mind that OpenType allows fonts to have language-specific
>> behaviours. You could create a font in which the glyph for 0069 is
>> dotless for Gaelic, and dotted otherwise.
>
>This way you can use the COMBINING DOT ABOVE if you want a dot above the i
>for Irish text.
>
>Carl
Thanks. Didn't know that (scanning my incoming mail for 'Irish' didn't turn
up PC's reference to 'Gaelic'). I am not familiar with OpenType. Any
OpenType-savvy fontmaker like to discuss this offline, with a view to
developing fonts derived from authentic native Irish models? EGTeo might be
willing to fund some such (and I have a background in calligraphy, which
could help).
Thanks for recounting your keyboardmaking experiences, Carl (which must
have been painful, even to recount). It is a comfort to see an intelligent
person publicly admitting to 'thousands of dollars down the drain' on an
investment which failed to pay. And yet more of a comfort to see such as
you and I can afterwards not only survive, but thrive!
Best,
mg
-- Marion Gunn * EGTeo (Estab.1991) 27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn, Baile an Bhóthair, Co. Átha Cliath, Éire. * mgunn@egt.ie * eamonn@egt.ie *
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