From: Philippe VERDY (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Jan 06 2005 - 08:51:03 CST
Hi Christopher!
Sorry, I'm not the right person. I'm Philippe Verdy, not Philipp Reichmuth !
I have written nothing about the Tibetan script since very long (if I ever discussed about it!)
"Christopher Fynn" wrote To: unicode@unicode.org, CC: "Philipp Reichmuth" , "Kenneth Whistler":
>
> Hi Phillipe
>
> Gregor Verhufen's old Tibetan fonts did *not* use an "underlying
> Wylie" representation for Tibetan data or glyphs. They use a
> "font-hack" encoding where Tbetan glyps are mapped to Windows ANSI
> code-page characters - but there is no real relationship between the
> characters they are mapped to and Wylie translitteration. The fonts did
> come with Keyman macros which converted Wylie translitteration typed on
> the keyboard to the characters the glyphs were mapped to in the font.
> The typed in Wylie is converted to other characters by Keyman - it is
> these characters which are stored not Wylie. I'm sure if you check with
> Gregor he will confirm this. I can even provide you with maps of the
> characters used in his font which I made for someone writing a converter
> from this encoding to Unicode. (Actually there are several encodings as
> the glyph mapping was not consistent in all his fonts).
>
> The Nitartha system is similar - it uses a Wylie like input method and
> a bunch of VBA macros wrapped up in a WLL library to convert the input
> to the precomposed Tibetan glyphs in 8-bit fonts. However in the case of
> the Nitartha system the glyphs for one type face are spread over a
> number of different fonts so there is a lot of font switching involved.
>
> Hope this clarifies things.
>
> Philipp Reichmuth wrote:
>
> > Kenneth Whistler schrieb:
> >
> >>>> I wouldn't rule this out entirely. For example, I know one attempt
> >>>> to implement a Tibetan font where the underlying representation was
> >>>> Latin (Wylie), and the Tibetan glyphs were generated from the Latin
> >>>> transliteration using OpenType rules
> >>
> >>
> >> I presume Philipp Reichmuth was talking about:
> >> http://www.nitartha.org/wylieandconverter.html
> >
> > Actually I wasn't; I was referring to an in-house project at our
> > institute for Central Asian Studies, a derivative of the fonts from
> > http://home.t-online.de/home/0228359452-0001/jamyang.htm. Newer
> > versions use "proper" Unicode Tibetan codepoints instead, for obvious
> > interoperability reasons.
>
> > The underlying plain text is perfectly Unicode conformant; after all,
> > it's only Latin, and the standard isn't concerned about glyphs and their
> > meaning. I guess this is "nonconformant" only in that it somehow defeats
> > the purpose of Unicode.
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