Re: First Sentence in Piktok

On Sun, 07 Dec 2003 10:57:33 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

> --- Christophe Grandsire
>>
>> You know nothing about fonts do you?
>
> I'm afraid my ignorance is showing.  I have been a
> computer programmer sin 1963, but it is true, I know
> nothing about fonts.  I grew up with 7-bit ASCII,
> teletype machines, and dot matrix video displays.  I
> guess I need to catch up to the times. :)
It's unfortunately a hell of a long ride from 7 bits to 64 (ish) bits, with
a whole boatload of knowledge to be learned or ignored along the way. Most
of it, you can probably ignore, if that suits your learning style.
Basically, the number of characters available has become virtually
infinite, altough many codes are strictly predefined. Everything else is
gravy.

As has been answered, if you've got fewer than 6400 glyphs in your script,
you can use the "private use" areea of a Unicode font. Once I get a
Unicode-aware font program, that's exactly what I'll be doing to encode the
Old Thagojian and WC8 syllabaries. Is there any advice from the group on
what I could or should get?

As has also been answered, you can map sequences of keystrokes to glyphs,
rather than needing a one-to-one mapping. See also www.tavultesoft.com, who
sell a program that allows you to make custom key-sequence-to-glyph
mappings that will work with any Unicode-aware Windows program. It's not a
full-fledged IME maker (for that you'll need to code from scratch), but it
has handled everything I've thrown at it so far (nothing more exotic than a
"type X-SAMPA to get IPA" keyboard).





Paul