Re: Yoruba Keyboard

From: John Hudson (tiro@tiro.com)
Date: Wed May 05 2004 - 15:01:14 CDT


African Oracle wrote:

> This mail is written with the Yoruba Keyboard that was rolled out yetserday.
> Please just look at the issue raised earlier raised.
>
> ÁÉẸ́ÍÓÚ
> áéíẹ́ọ́ú
>
> Looking at the above it is obvious that the acute on top of the e and o with
> dot below is a bit too high almost to the point of looking like a cedilla
> under E.

That is entirely dependent on the font, regardless of how the diacritic is encoded. Quite
simply, this is not an encoding issue.

> In transit the acute and the grave could be removed by just putting the
> cursor in between ẹ́ and ọ́ because ther are combined in a way that is not
> binding.

> It even becomes a compounded problem during copying and pasting because the
> accent occupy two cursor space. I still think with all these observations
> something must be done.

Cursor positioning is something that happens at a higher level than character encoding,
and there are several different models for cursor positioning in combining character
sequences, implemented by different software developers and often varying according to script.

By the way, are you familiar with the A12n Collaboration project for African computing?
Encoding, fonts and keyboard layouts for African languages have been quite extensively
discussed on that mailing list, and there is a higher number of African participants than
on the Unicode list. For details, see http://www.bisharat.net/ and, for mailing list
subscription, http://lists.kabissa.org/mailman/listinfo/a12n-collaboration

John Hudson

-- 
Tiro Typeworks        www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC        tiro@tiro.com
I often play against man, God says, but it is he who wants
   to lose, the idiot, and it is I who want him to win.
And I succeed sometimes
In making him win.
              - Charles Peguy


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