From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 16 2004 - 11:45:49 EST
Someone noted this about my recently posted PDFs on http://www.rodage.org/pub/
for Mende:
> The glyphs don't display, all the squares are empty except for
> the code points. Is this because of Plane Fourteen, or do I need
> to install the font first?
>
> Even after installing the font, the squares are still empty...
Well, I changed some PDF generation options but I wonder if this has an impact.
Is the "JG Mende" font installetion required to see the PDF and not square
boxes?
Are there problelms with the PDF format which seems to work on another machine I
have with Windows XP and Acrobat 6, but without the font installed?
Finally, I got the following exchange with Jason Glavy, the author of that font:
JG> > You did not answer about the tone marks used in the Latin transcription of
JG> > Mende. Are they used also for the Kikaku transcription?
JG>
JG> Unlike the Latin, there is no graphical tone representation in the
JG> Kikaku script. Moreover, I am not aware of any numbers or punctuation
JG> for this script.
So it seems that tone marks used in the latin transcription of Mendé are not
marked in the Kikaku script. It would be interesting to have some book prints
available to see if there are punctuation signs or symbols to mark word
separation, as well as digits or numbers (some syllables in the Kikaku script
closely ressemble to the European digits, and I wonder if an alternate notation
was used to mark numbers, or dates, or simply commercial quantities for market
exchange and accounting or for marriage dotations, or for customary judiciary
decisions, in countries where most of negocations were performed orally).
Is the space convention used to mark word separation? Are there additional
ligating hyphens?
Is the script really left-to-right since it was created in the 20's? If not,
this may explain why we almost always find glyph variants of nearly every
letter, with a significant number of syllabic glyphs renversed 90° or mirrored.
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